Website Pre-Launch Checklist: What to Verify Before You Go Live

The Most Expensive Bugs Are the Ones You Ship

Launch day is when a website gets its worst first impressions. A missing page title, a blocked search engine setting left over from staging, a contact form that quietly fails - none of these are hard to fix, but all of them cost you visitors during the exact window when attention is highest.

The good news is that nearly every launch problem is predictable. This checklist walks through the six areas that matter, in the order worth checking them.

Search Visibility

1. Remove the Staging Block

Development sites are usually hidden from search engines, and that instruction is the single most common thing teams forget to remove at launch. A site that stays blocked can be invisible for weeks. Check this first - it invalidates everything else on the list.

2. Unique Titles and Descriptions on Every Page

Every page needs its own title of roughly 50 to 60 characters and its own description of roughly 150 to 160 characters. Duplicated boilerplate across the site is a wasted opportunity: these two lines are your advert in the search results.

3. One Main Heading Per Page

Each page should have exactly one top-level heading that describes what the page is about, with lower levels nested logically beneath it and no skipped levels. Search engines and screen readers both rely on this structure to understand the page.

4. A Sitemap and Crawl Instructions

Publish a sitemap listing your real pages, and make sure your crawl instructions point to it. This is how search engines discover pages that are not yet linked from anywhere else - which, on a brand new site, is most of them.

5. Canonical Addresses

Decide whether your site lives with or without the www prefix, and make every other version redirect to that choice. Sites reachable at multiple addresses split their ranking signals across duplicates.

6. Structured Data

Mark up your organisation details, and any articles, products or FAQs you publish. This is what earns the enhanced listings - star ratings, prices, expandable questions - that stand out in search results.

Performance

7. Compression Enabled

Modern compression cuts the size of your pages, stylesheets and scripts by 60 to 80%. It is a server setting, it takes minutes, and a surprising number of new sites launch without it.

8. Images Optimised and Correctly Sized

Convert photographs to a modern format and serve them at the dimensions they are actually displayed. A 4000-pixel-wide image squeezed into a 600-pixel slot wastes most of what it downloads. Images are typically over half a page's total weight.

9. Below-the-Fold Images Deferred

Images further down the page should load only as the visitor approaches them. This gets the visible part of the page in front of them faster.

10. Caching Configured

Tell browsers how long they can reuse your images, stylesheets and scripts. Without this, returning visitors re-download everything on every visit.

11. Third-Party Scripts Audited

Every analytics tag, chat widget, social embed and advertising script adds load time and blocks interaction. Count them before launch, remove the ones nobody asked for, and delay the ones that are not needed immediately.

Mobile

12. Viewport Configured

Your pages need to tell mobile browsers to render at device width. Without that instruction, phones display a shrunken desktop layout and visitors have to pinch and zoom to read anything.

13. No Horizontal Scrolling

Check every page at a narrow screen width. Anything that forces sideways scrolling - a wide table, an unconstrained image, an absolutely positioned element - needs fixing before launch.

14. Readable Text and Tappable Buttons

Body text should be at least 16 pixels, and anything tappable should be at least 48 by 48 pixels with clear spacing around it. Test with an actual thumb on an actual phone, not just a resized desktop browser.

Security

15. Encryption On, Everywhere

Your certificate should be valid, and every visit over the unencrypted address should redirect to the encrypted one. Free certificates make this a solved problem - there is no reason to launch without it.

16. No Mixed Content

An encrypted page that pulls in an image or script over an unencrypted connection breaks the security chain and triggers browser warnings. This most often creeps in through hard-coded addresses copied from a staging environment.

17. Security Headers Set

A handful of response headers instruct browsers to block content-type guessing, prevent your site being framed by others, enforce encrypted connections, restrict where content may be loaded from, and limit what referrer information leaks out. Most hosting platforms let you configure all of them in a single settings panel.

18. Server Details Hidden

Headers that announce your exact server software and version are free intelligence for anyone scanning for known weaknesses. Remove or obscure them.

Accessibility

19. Language, Labels and Alt Text

Declare the page language so screen readers pronounce content correctly. Give every form field a properly associated label. Describe every meaningful image, and mark decorative ones as decorative. These three take an afternoon and clear most automated accessibility failures.

20. Keyboard Navigation Works

Put the mouse aside and tab through each key page. You should always be able to see where focus is, reach every interactive element, and skip past the navigation to the main content. If you cannot complete your primary conversion flow by keyboard alone, neither can a significant group of your visitors.

Content and Links

21. No Placeholder Text Left Behind

Search your site for filler copy, "coming soon" blocks and template defaults. Placeholder text on a live page reads as abandonment.

22. Every Link Goes Somewhere

Check internal links, external links, footer links and navigation. Broken links on a fresh launch signal a site nobody is maintaining.

23. Forms Actually Deliver

Submit every form on the live site, not staging, and confirm the message arrives at the real inbox. Silent form failures are the most costly launch bug there is, because nothing looks wrong from either side.

24. A Real Error Page

Your not-found page should match your design and offer a route back - navigation, search, or links to your main sections. A bare server error page loses a visitor who was one click from finding what they wanted.

Run the Checklist Automatically

Most of the items above are exactly what an automated audit is for. Website Grader runs 70+ checks across all six of these categories - SEO, Performance, Mobile, Security, Accessibility and Content - and returns a score per category with a pass, warning or fail on each individual check.

Scan your staging site before launch and your live site immediately after. The comparison catches anything that behaves differently in production, which in practice is where most launch surprises hide.

After Launch

A launch checklist is a snapshot. Sites drift: a plugin update adds three tracking scripts, a certificate approaches expiry, a redesign drops the alt text. Re-scan after every significant change, and consider automated weekly monitoring so a regression reaches you as an alert rather than as a drop in traffic you notice a month later.

Check Your Site Before You Go Live

Enter your URL below for a free scan across all six categories. The full report walks through every failing check with the specific fix - so you can work down the list instead of hunting for problems.