What Should Be on Your Website Launch Checklist?

You've spent weeks getting your new website ready. The design looks sharp, the words are all in place, and you're one click away from making it live. But before you hit publish, there's a real chance you're missing something that could quietly hold your rankings back before you've even started.

Sound familiar? Here's the good news: most launch problems come down to a handful of avoidable gaps. This guide walks you through exactly what should be on your website launch checklist, so you go live with confidence instead of guesswork. You don't need to be a tech expert to get this right.

Website Launch Checklist at a Glance

Before going through each step in detail, here's a quick overview of what to check. Think of it like a pre-flight checklist for pilots: skipping a step might not cause an immediate problem, but it raises the risk of something going wrong later.

Each of these areas plays a different role. Get them right before launch, and you avoid a rushed clean-up job once your site is already live and Google has started crawling it (visiting your pages to work out what they're about).

Get Your Website Planning Sorted First

Every good website launch starts with a plan, not just a design file. Before you touch a single page, get clear on what you want each part of your site to do.

Start by listing your most important pages: your homepage, your main service or product pages, and your contact page. These are the pages you want customers, and Google, to find first.

Think about your website planning the way you'd plan a shop floor. You wouldn't put your best-selling products at the back of the store where nobody sees them. The same logic applies here: your most important pages need to be easy to find from your homepage.

While you're planning, sketch out a simple sitemap (a list or diagram of every page on your site). This helps you spot gaps, like a missing FAQ page or a thin About Us page, before you launch rather than after.

What to do next: Write down your five most important pages and check that each one is linked from your homepage or main menu.

Run a Full Website Audit Before You Go Live

This is the step most people skip, and it's the one that causes the most problems later. A website audit is simply a careful check of your entire site before it goes live, looking for anything that could confuse Google or frustrate visitors.

Start by checking for broken links: links that point to pages that don't exist anymore, or never existed in the first place. A handful of dead links might not sound serious, but they make your site harder for Google to crawl properly, and they leave visitors stuck on a dead end.

Next, look for duplicate content. This happens when the same or very similar text appears on more than one page, sometimes because a template was copied and never updated. Google can struggle to work out which version to show in the search results page, so duplicate pages can end up competing against each other instead of ranking well.

You'll also want to check for crawl errors: pages Google tried to visit but couldn't open, often because of a broken link, a blocked page, or a server issue. Tools like SEO Analyser or Google Search Console can flag these for you without needing any technical background.

A typical pre-launch audit checklist includes:

• Broken internal and external links
• Duplicate or near-duplicate page content
• Thin pages with very little useful text
• Missing or incorrect redirects from old pages
• Pages accidentally blocked from being crawled

Picture a Perth boutique launching a new site with forty product pages. Before the audit, twelve pages had duplicate descriptions copied straight from a supplier's website, and six old blog links pointed nowhere. After fixing these issues, the site launched with a cleaner structure that Google could crawl and understand far more easily, without those early red flags sitting there waiting to be found.

Running this check before launch, rather than after, saves you from cleaning up ranking problems that could have been avoided altogether.

Check Your Website Setup and Technical Basics

Once your content is in good shape, turn your attention to the technical side of your website setup. This is the behind-the-scenes work that affects how well your site runs, even if visitors never notice it directly.

Page speed is one of the first things to check. A slow website is like a shop door that takes ten seconds to open: most people just walk off before it swings open. Use a speed test tool to see how long your key pages take to load, and fix anything that's dragging, like oversized images.

Security matters too. Make sure your site has a valid SSL certificate (the padlock icon next to a website address), since browsers will warn visitors if it's missing. This affects trust, and in some cases, how comfortable people feel handing over their details on a contact form.

Finally, check that your internal links all point where they should, and that your navigation menu makes sense to someone who has never visited your site before.

Get Your On-Page SEO Ready for Launch

With the technical basics sorted, it's time to look at your on-page SEO: the parts of each page you can control directly, like titles and descriptions.

Every page needs a clear, unique title that describes what that page is about, ideally including the main word or phrase your customers would search for. Avoid using the same title on multiple pages, since this makes it harder for Google to work out which page to show for a particular search.

Next, write a short description for each page, the kind of text that appears under your link on the search results page. Think of it like the blurb on the back of a book: it doesn't directly affect where you rank, but it can decide whether someone actually clicks through to your site.

Headings matter too. Each page should have one clear main heading, followed by smaller subheadings that break up the content logically. This helps both readers and Google understand what each section covers.

What to do next: Check your homepage and top three pages first. Give each one a unique title and a short description before you worry about the rest of the site.

Make Sure Your Business Details Are Consistent Everywhere

If you run a local business, your business details need to match everywhere they appear online: your website, your Google Business Profile, and any directory listings.

Even small differences, like an old phone number or a slightly different business name, can confuse both customers and Google. This inconsistency can make it harder for Google to confirm your business is legitimate and located where you say it is.

Before launch, check your name, address, and phone number against your Google Business Profile and fix any mismatches you find.

Test Everything on Mobile Before You Launch

Most of your visitors will likely find you on a phone, not a desktop computer. That makes mobile-friendly design one of the easier checks to skip, and one of the most noticeable if you do.

Open your site on your own phone and click through your main pages. Check that text is readable without zooming, buttons are easy to tap, and forms are simple to fill in with one hand.

If anything feels fiddly or cramped, it's worth fixing before launch rather than after visitors start complaining.

Set Up Tracking So You Can Measure Results

You can't tell whether your launch went well if you're not measuring anything. Before you go live, set up Google Search Console and a basic analytics tool so you can see how visitors find and use your site.

Search Console also tells you once your pages are indexed, which is worth checking in the days after launch. If a page isn't showing up after a week or two, that's worth investigating.

Don't worry if this sounds complicated, it's not. Both tools are free, and setup usually takes less than half an hour.

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