Website Launch Checklist: 15 Things to Check Before You Go Live

The moment right before a website goes live is when the smallest mistakes are easiest to catch — and the most expensive to miss. A broken contact form discovered a week after launch means a week of lost inquiries you'll never get back. Here's the full checklist we run through before any site goes live, condensed into 15 checks you can do yourself in an afternoon.

Technical Foundation

1. 1. SSL certificate is active (HTTPS, not HTTP)Check the address bar for the padlock icon. A site without SSL gets flagged as "Not Secure" by every modern browser — an instant trust-killer, and it also hurts your Google ranking.
2. 2. All pages load with no broken links or 404sClick through every navigation link, every button, and every footer link. A broken internal link on launch day looks careless and erodes trust in everything else on the site.
3. 3. Custom 404 page is set upIf someone does hit a dead link, a branded 404 page with a way back to your homepage keeps them on your site instead of bouncing immediately.
4. 4. Redirects are in place for any old URLsIf this is a redesign of an existing site, old URLs that used to rank on Google need 301 redirects to their new equivalents — otherwise you lose that ranking history and send visitors to dead pages.
5. 5. Favicon is setThe small icon in the browser tab. Easy to forget, and its absence makes a site look unfinished in a browser with multiple tabs open.

Content & Forms

1. 6. Every contact form has been tested — by actually submitting itFill it out yourself and confirm the email arrives, including checking your spam folder. This is the single most common launch-day failure we see.
2. 7. Phone numbers and email addresses are clickableOn mobile, a phone number should open the dialer with one tap (tel: link) and an email address should open the mail app (mailto: link) — not require the visitor to copy and paste.
3. 8. All placeholder text and "lorem ipsum" content is goneSearch the whole site for leftover placeholder copy, stock example prices, or "Company Name Here" text that got missed during content entry.
4. 9. Spelling and grammar have been proofread — by a second personThe person who wrote the copy is the worst person to catch their own typos, because they read what they meant to write, not what's actually there.
5. 10. Legal pages exist if you're collecting any dataA basic privacy policy is expected if you have a contact form or use analytics — even a simple one. This matters more if you're processing payments or storing customer information.

Performance & Tracking

1. 11. The site has been tested on an actual phone, not just resized in a browserReal mobile testing catches issues that browser dev tools miss — tap targets too small, text that's hard to read, images that load slowly on mobile data.
2. 12. Page load speed has been checkedRun your homepage through PageSpeed Insights. A slow launch is a bad first impression, and it's much easier to fix image sizes and scripts before launch than after traffic starts arriving.
3. 13. Google Analytics (or equivalent) is installed and verified workingWithout this, you're flying blind after launch — no way to know how many visitors you're getting, where they come from, or what they do on the site.
4. 14. Google Search Console is set up and the sitemap is submittedThis is what actually gets your site into Google's index in the first place. A beautiful site that Google doesn't know exists gets zero organic traffic.
5. 15. Social sharing preview looks correctPaste your homepage URL into a Facebook post or WhatsApp message (as a draft, don't send it) and check that the preview image, title, and description look right. A broken preview makes shared links look untrustworthy.

A Simple Way to Run Through This

Don't try to check all 15 items in your head while eyeballing the site. Print this list, or copy it into a note, and physically check off each item as you verify it — including the exact contact form test. It takes maybe 30–45 minutes and it's the cheapest insurance you'll ever buy against a bad launch day.

What Happens If You Skip This

Most of the time, nothing dramatic happens immediately — the site looks fine, visitors arrive, some inquiries come in. The damage from skipping this checklist is usually quiet and cumulative: a form that silently drops 20% of submissions, a slow mobile load time that costs you visitors before they ever see your offer, or months of missing analytics data you can never get back. None of these show up as an obvious "something is broken" moment — they just show up later as "why aren't we getting more inquiries."