Website Launch Checklist: What to Check Before You Go Live

Most website launches don't fail because of anything dramatic. They fail quietly: a redirect that was never set up, a contact form that silently stops working, a Google Analytics tag pasted into the wrong template. Nobody notices for weeks, sometimes months.

I've launched a lot of sites over the years, and the same handful of things get missed almost every time. Here's what actually matters before you flip the switch.

Sort your redirects first, not after

If you're replacing an existing website, every page that used to rank on Google has a URL somewhere in its index. Change the address without a 301 redirect and that page effectively disappears. Visitors hit a 404, and so does Google, eventually dropping it from search results.

Before launch, pull a list of your current site's URLs (a free crawler like Screaming Frog will do this in minutes) and map each one to its new home. It's tedious. It's also the single most common reason a rebuilt site loses traffic in its first month.

Set up analytics before launch, not after

I still see this one constantly: a business launches, gets excited, sends the link round to everyone they know, and only adds Google Analytics two weeks later. That first fortnight of traffic, arguably some of the most valuable data you'll ever get, is gone for good.

Get tracking installed and tested against a staging version of the site before it goes live. Check that form submissions actually register as events. A tracking setup that "looks right" in the code but never fires a single real event is worse than having no analytics at all, because it gives you false confidence.

Actually test the things people will actually do

Not "does the homepage load." Fill in the contact form yourself, on your phone, on a slow connection if you can manage it. Click every link in the footer. Try to book, buy or enquire the exact way a stranger would, with no prior knowledge of how the site is built.

Things that get missed more often than you'd think

• Phone numbers that aren't clickable on mobile
• Forms that submit successfully but never actually email anyone
• A favicon that's still the default placeholder
• Broken links in a "coming soon" blog post nobody remembered to finish

The legal pages nobody wants to write

A privacy policy isn't optional if you collect any personal data at all, including through a basic contact form. It doesn't need to be complicated, but it needs to exist, and it needs to be accurate about what you actually do with someone's details. The same goes for a cookie banner if you're running analytics or any kind of tracking pixel. Under UK GDPR, that consent has to be asked for before the cookies are set, not after.

Speed still decides who stays

A beautiful site that takes six seconds to load on a phone will lose visitors before they see any of it. Compress images before upload rather than relying on the CMS to do it for you, and keep an eye on anything that autoplays video in the background, as it's one of the most common reasons an otherwise well-built site feels sluggish.

Tell Google you exist

Submit your sitemap through Google Search Console on day one. It's a five-minute job and it's the difference between Google discovering your new pages in days rather than weeks.

None of this is glamorous. It's also the difference between a launch that goes smoothly and one where you spend the next month firefighting things that should have been caught before anyone else ever saw the site. If you'd rather have someone else run through this list for you, get in touch. It's usually a same-day job.