Website launch checklist

A launch is the last hour before strangers see the site. This is the list we go through on every nine75 build before we point the domain. Most of it takes 10 minutes. The 2 or 3 items you skip are the ones you will hear about in the first week.

How to use it

Work through it on the live domain, not the staging address. Half the problems here only exist in production: the analytics key, the form endpoint, the redirect from http. Tick items as you go; the ticks save in this browser. Print the page if the client wants to sign it off.

What matters most

Backups first. A site with no tested restore is a site you have not finished. Run the backup, then restore it somewhere and look at it. Once is enough, but once is required.

Forms second. A contact form that fails quietly is worse than no form; the visitor thinks you ignored them. Send a test from a phone on mobile data and check the inbox it lands in, plus the spam folder.

Then the things Google reads: titles, descriptions, the sitemap, and the noindex flag that staging sites carry and that stays on more often than anyone admits.

What people forget

The 404 page, the print stylesheet and the favicon. None of them will lose you a customer on day one. All of them tell a visitor whether someone cared about the details, which is the reason you paid for a site rather than a Facebook page.

The last item is the honest one. Hand your phone to someone who has never seen the site and watch them tap. Whatever they hesitate on is your first fix after launch.

If you are launching on WordPress, our hosting includes the backups, TLS and redirect rules on this list, so 3 items tick themselves.