Website Launch Checklist: 30 Things to Check Before Going Live

Launching a website without a proper checklist is like shipping a product without testing it. Things will be missed. Some will be obvious in hindsight. A few will be embarrassing.

This checklist covers 30 items across content, design, SEO, performance, accessibility, and post-launch feedback — organized by category so you can work through them systematically.

Content checklist

• All placeholder text (Lorem Ipsum) has been replaced with final copy

• Contact information (email, phone, address) is correct on every page

• Legal pages are in place: privacy policy, terms of service, cookie policy

• All internal links work and point to the correct pages

• Images have descriptive alt text for accessibility and SEO

• Forms submit correctly and send data to the right destination

Design and UX checklist

• The website looks correct on desktop, tablet, and mobile viewports

• All buttons and interactive elements have visible hover and focus states

• Typography is consistent: headings, body text, and link styles match the design system

• Favicon and app icon are set correctly

• 404 page exists and is helpful, not a dead end

• Page load animations and transitions work smoothly

SEO checklist

• Every page has a unique, descriptive title tag under 60 characters

• Every page has a meta description under 160 characters

• H1 tags are used once per page and are descriptive

• Open Graph and Twitter Card tags are set for social sharing

• A sitemap.xml is accessible and submitted to Google Search Console

• robots.txt allows crawling of public pages and blocks private routes

• Canonical URLs are set to avoid duplicate content

• Structured data (schema.org) is added where applicable

Performance checklist

• Pages load in under 3 seconds on a standard connection

• Images are compressed and served in modern formats (WebP where possible)

• CSS and JavaScript are minified and bundled

• Fonts are preloaded or loaded asynchronously

• No render-blocking resources in the critical path

Pre-launch feedback checklist

• Run a structured feedback round with the client using a website feedback tool

• Share a review link so the client can pin comments directly on the live staging site

• Set a deadline for the feedback round — open-ended reviews never close

• Verify all feedback items are resolved before going live

• Archive the pre-launch round and create a post-launch QA round

Post-launch

• Verify the live site loads correctly on the production domain

• Test all forms and integrations one final time on production

• Submit the sitemap to Google Search Console

• Set up uptime monitoring

• Run one final feedback round on the live production URL