A new website has a lot of moving parts, and launch day is almost always rushed. Something small slips through, and the first person to notice is a customer.
This is the list we run through before any site goes live. Share it with whoever is building your website and tick things off together.
Content
- Proofread every page. Spelling mistakes on a homepage cost trust fast. Read it out loud if you can. You'll catch more.
- Remove placeholder text and images. Search the site for "lorem ipsum" and look out for stock photos you meant to replace.
- Check contact details everywhere. Phone number, email, address and WhatsApp link should be correct and match your Google Business Profile exactly.
- Add the legal pages. At minimum, a privacy policy. If you sell online, add terms and conditions plus refund and shipping policies.
Mobile and browsers
- Test on real phones, not just a shrunk-down browser window. Try both an Android phone and an iPhone if you can.
- Make sure buttons are easy to tap and text is readable without pinching to zoom.
- Open the site in Chrome, Safari and Edge. Something that looks perfect in one can break in another.
Forms and contact
- Submit every form yourself. Then check the enquiry actually arrives where it should, and doesn't land in spam.
- Test click-to-call and WhatsApp links on a phone. They're often the main way local customers get in touch.
- Add spam protection to your forms, or you'll be deleting junk enquiries within a week.
SEO basics
- Give every page its own title and meta description. No duplicates, and no "Home | My WordPress Site".
- Use one clear H1 heading per page that says what the page is about.
- Add alt text to meaningful images so search engines and screen readers know what they show.
- Make sure the site isn't hidden from Google. Sites are often blocked from search engines while they're being built. Forgetting to switch that off is one of the most common launch mistakes there is.
- Set up 301 redirects from your old website's page addresses to the new ones, so you keep the rankings you already have.
Tracking
- Install analytics, such as Google Analytics 4, and check it's recording your own visit.
- Verify the site in Google Search Console and submit your sitemap. It's free, and it tells you how Google sees your site.
Speed and security
- Run PageSpeed Insights on your key pages and fix anything obvious. Our guide on why websites are slow covers the usual fixes.
- Check HTTPS works on every page, and that both the www and non-www versions of your domain lead to the same website.
- Set up automatic backups, and make sure you know how to restore one before you ever need to.
Easy to miss: number 19. If yourbusiness.com and www.yourbusiness.com show different things, Google can treat them as two separate sites and split your rankings between them.
After launch
Check Search Console a week after launch for crawl errors, watch your enquiries, and ask a couple of friends or customers to use the site and tell you what confused them. Fresh eyes catch the things you've stopped seeing.
Then start thinking about getting found. Our beginner's guide to SEO for small businesses is a good next step.
Want a launch you don't have to worry about?
We build, test and launch websites with all of this taken care of.