Long launch checklists get skimmed. This is the short one, drawn from the failures that actually cost money rather than the ones that are merely untidy.
The two that get skipped most
- 01Remove the staging block. A site that launches with search engines blocked can sit invisible for weeks, and everything looks fine from the outside. Check the live robots file and the page-level directive after going live, not before.
- 02Test the redirect map programmatically. Every old URL, expecting a permanent redirect to a working page. A spreadsheet someone eyeballed is not a test, and this is where migrations lose their traffic.
Before launch
- Submit a real enquiry through every form and confirm it arrives. Forms fail silently more often than anything else on a site.
- Complete a real transaction end to end, including the confirmation email and the refund path.
- Load the site on a mid-range phone on mobile data. Not the simulator.
- Check the site in both light and dark system settings if the design responds to them.
- Confirm analytics is recording, and recording once rather than twice.
- Verify the SSL certificate covers both the apex domain and www, and that one redirects to the other.
On launch day
- 01Submit the sitemap and request indexing of the homepage.
- 02Watch the error log for the first few hours. Most launch problems surface immediately or not at all.
- 03Confirm email deliverability from the live domain, including the records that authorise your sender. Notification email landing in spam is a lead pipeline that quietly does not exist.
- 04Have a rollback plan you have actually tested.
The week after
- Check crawl errors daily for a fortnight.
- Watch the funnel for a step that suddenly loses everyone. New checkouts often have one broken path.
- Re-run performance measurement on real field data rather than a lab score.
The one nobody enjoys
Write down what you did not finish. Every launch has a list, and the difference between a good project and a bad one is whether that list is written down and scheduled, or quietly forgotten until it becomes an incident.
Working on something like this?
We build websites, stores and custom applications, and we will tell you honestly if the thing you are describing does not need one.