A good launch is boring, and that's the point. The drama — broken links, missing meta, a contact form that emails no one — is almost always avoidable. Here's the 12-point list we run before any site goes live.
Content & polish
- 1. Proofread everything. Real content, no "lorem ipsum", no placeholder phone numbers. Read it aloud once.
- 2. Check every link and button. Internal links, external links, and especially the call-to-action buttons. Nothing kills trust like a dead "Contact us".
- 3. Test the contact form end-to-end. Submit it for real and confirm the email actually arrives — to the right inbox, not spam.
SEO & sharing
- 4. Unique title + meta description on every page. Not "Home | Home".
- 5. Open Graph + a social image so shared links look professional, not broken.
- 6. Sitemap & robots in place, and the site is actually allowed to be indexed (it's astonishing how often a "noindex" from staging ships to production).
Performance & mobile
- 7. Compress images. The single biggest, easiest speed win. No 4MB hero photos.
- 8. Test on a real phone. Not just a narrow browser window — tap the menu, fill the form, check the buttons are thumb-sized.
- 9. Check it in more than one browser. A quick pass in Safari and Chrome catches most surprises.
Tech, security & launch day
- 10. HTTPS everywhere with a valid certificate, and old HTTP URLs redirecting to HTTPS.
- 11. Backups and monitoring on before launch, not after the first incident. Know you'll hear about an outage first.
- 12. Set up redirects from old URLs if you're replacing a site — protect the SEO you already earned.
The best launches are the ones nobody remembers, because nothing went wrong. That calm is built the day before, with a checklist.
If running all of this on every client site sounds like a lot of repetitive work — it is. That's exactly the sort of thing a managed platform handles for you: HTTPS, backups, monitoring, sitemaps and sensible SEO defaults come switched on, so the checklist mostly takes care of itself.
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