The Website Launch Checklist: 40 Things to Check Before You Point the Domain

By Cody Wise, founder of Wise Media, Calgary. Last updated 6 November 2026.

Summary

• The three failures that actually cost money on launch day are broken redirects, an accidental noindex, and a contact form that silently stops delivering.
• Google’s own documentation says a page must be indexed and eligible for a snippet before it can appear in Search or in AI features. A launch that blocks crawling blocks everything downstream.
• Run the redirect map before launch, not after. A 404 that ranks is a ranking you have thrown away.
• Test the forms by actually submitting them, from a device that is not yours, to an inbox you can see.
• Budget a half day for the checks and a week of monitoring. Most launch damage shows up on day three, not day one.

Table Of Contents

• Before You Point The Domain
• Redirects And URL Structure
• Indexing, Crawling And Search Console
• Analytics, Tracking And Forms
• Content, Schema And Metadata
• Speed, Accessibility And Legal
• The First Seven Days After Launch
• Common Mistakes
• FAQ

Before You Point The Domain

These seven run on the staging site. If any of them fails, the launch waits.

1. Crawl the old site and save the result. Every URL, every status code, every title. This is the only snapshot you will ever have of what you had, and you cannot rebuild it after the fact. Export it to a spreadsheet and keep it.
2. Pull the top pages by traffic and by backlinks. These are the URLs that must not break. Everything else is a nice-to-have. If a page has earned links from other sites, its URL is an asset, not a preference.
3. Confirm who controls the domain and the DNS. Not who built the site. Who can log in and change the A record today. If the answer is a former developer who stopped replying, fix that before launch day, not during it. We wrote the full version of this problem in who controls your domain and DNS in Canada.
4. Lower the DNS TTL to 300 seconds, 24 hours before launch. This is the single cheapest insurance on this list. If something is wrong after the switch, a low TTL means you can roll back in minutes rather than waiting out a 48 hour cache.
5. Check the SSL certificate covers both the apex and the www subdomain. And that it will auto-renew. A certificate that expires 89 days after launch, on a host nobody is watching, is a very common and very avoidable outage.
6. Take a full backup of the live site and test the restore. Not just take the backup. Restore it somewhere and confirm it opens. An untested backup is a hope, not a plan.
7. Write the rollback procedure down. One page: what we change, in what order, and exactly what we revert if it goes wrong. Write it while calm. You will be reading it while not calm.

Redirects And URL Structure

This is where most of the money is lost. A redesign that changes URLs without a redirect map does not lose a little traffic. It loses the accumulated authority of every page whose address changed, and it loses it quietly, over about six weeks, which is long enough that people blame something else.

8. Build the redirect map from the old crawl, one row per URL. Old URL, new URL, status. Every old URL gets a destination or an explicit decision to let it 410.
9. Use 301, not 302. A 302 says temporary. Search engines treat it as temporary, which means the old URL keeps the authority and the new one never earns it.
10. Redirect to the closest equivalent page, never to the homepage by default. A mass redirect of forty deep pages to the homepage is read as a soft 404. You get no credit for it.
11. Eliminate redirect chains. Old URL to new URL, one hop. If your map produces A to B to C, rewrite it so A goes straight to C.
12. Pick one canonical host and force it. https plus www, or https without www. Not both. Every other variant 301s to the chosen one.
13. Force https sitewide and fix mixed content. An image loaded over http on an https page will throw a browser warning on the one page you care about most.
14. Keep trailing slash behaviour consistent. Pick one, enforce it, and make sure the other 301s rather than serving duplicate content at two addresses.
15. Test the map with the real list, not a sample. Run every old URL through and confirm a 301 to a 200. A redirect that lands on a 404 is worse than no redirect, because it looks fixed.

The Rule That Saves The Most Pain

If you do not have a strong reason to change a URL, do not change it. A redesign is a reason to change a design. It is not automatically a reason to change an address. Half the redirect maps we build exist because someone wanted prettier slugs, and prettier slugs are worth almost nothing against the risk.

Indexing, Crawling And Search Console

Google’s documentation on AI features and your website states that for a page to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode it must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, and that there are no additional technical requirements. The same prerequisite governs ordinary search results. Everything in your content strategy depends on these six checks passing.

16. Remove the staging noindex. This is the single most common launch failure in the industry, and it is embarrassing precisely because it is so simple. Check the response header and the meta tag, on more than one template.
17. Check robots.txt does not disallow the whole site. A staging robots.txt with Disallow: / that gets deployed to production will deindex you within days.
18. Decide your AI crawler policy deliberately. OpenAI documents four separate crawlers doing four different jobs. OAI-SearchBot controls whether you appear in ChatGPT search results; GPTBot governs model training only. Blocking everything with AI in the name removes you from ChatGPT search while leaving training untouched, which is almost never what anyone intends.
19. Generate and submit an XML sitemap. It should list canonical, indexable URLs only. A sitemap full of redirects and noindexed pages is a signal that your site is untidy.
20. Verify the property in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Do it before launch so you have the historical line to compare against, not after you notice a problem.
21. Check canonical tags point to the live domain. A canonical left pointing at staging will hand your rankings to a URL nobody can reach.

Analytics, Tracking And Forms

A launch you cannot measure is a launch you cannot defend. And a form that stops delivering is the most expensive bug on this page, because nothing visibly breaks. The phone just gets quieter.

22. Confirm the analytics tag fires on every template. Home, service page, blog post, contact, thank you. Not just the homepage.
23. Submit every form yourself, from a phone, on mobile data. Not on the office wifi, not logged in as an admin. Confirm the notification arrives and confirm the submission is stored somewhere other than an email inbox.
24. Check the form notification is not going to spam. Set up proper authentication for the sending domain. If your form notifications come from a server with no SPF record, they will land in junk and you will never know.
25. Confirm conversion tracking fires on the thank you page. Then confirm the thank you page is noindexed, so it does not show up in search and inflate your conversion count with organic visitors.
26. Test every phone number and email link. Tap them on an actual phone. A tel: link with a typo is a lead you never hear about.
27. Check consent and cookie banners behave. If you serve Canadian and EU visitors, confirm the banner blocks what it claims to block before consent. Our guide to Google Consent Mode for Canadian advertisers covers what breaks in the ad platforms when this is wrong.
28. Verify call tracking numbers swap correctly if you use them, and that the fallback number is the real one if the script fails.

Content, Schema And Metadata

29. Every page has a unique title and meta description. Not a template with the business name repeated 40 times. Titles in the 50 to 60 character range, with the thing the page is actually about at the front.
30. One H1 per page, and it describes the page. Not the company name on every template.
31. Check for placeholder text. Search the whole site for lorem, TODO, your company name here, and the previous client’s name if the theme was reused. This happens more than anyone admits.
32. Images have descriptive alt text and sane filenames. Not IMG_4471.jpg. This is an accessibility requirement first and an SEO benefit second.
33. Ship and validate your structured data. Organization and LocalBusiness at minimum, plus Article on posts and Service on service pages. Run it through Google’s Rich Results Test. Note that Google states structured data is not required for its generative AI features, so ship it for rich results and machine readability rather than because someone promised it unlocks AI Overviews.
34. Add Open Graph and Twitter card tags, then test a real share. Paste the URL into the platform and look at the card. A missing OG image means every share of your site is a grey box.
35. Check internal links point at live URLs. A redesign usually breaks a dozen in-body links. Fix them at launch, because links in content are how authority moves around your site, a point we made at length in internal linking for topical authority.

Speed, Accessibility And Legal

36. Test on a real phone over mobile data, not desktop Chrome. Your office connection is lying to you about how fast the site is.
37. Check Core Web Vitals on the templates that matter. Homepage, main service page, a blog post. Fix layout shift first, because it is usually caused by one unsized image or a late-loading font and it is the cheapest of the three to resolve.
38. Run a keyboard-only pass on the main conversion path. Tab from the top of the homepage to a submitted form without touching the mouse. If you cannot, neither can a screen reader user, and in Canada that is a compliance exposure as well as a lost customer.
39. Confirm the legal pages exist and are linked. Privacy policy, terms, and an accessibility statement if you have one. If you collect anything through a form, you need a privacy policy, which we covered in do I need a privacy policy in Canada.
40. Check the 404 page is useful. It should return an actual 404 status code, carry the site navigation, and offer a search box. A 404 that returns 200 is a soft 404 and it confuses everything.

The First Seven Days After Launch

Launch day is the easy part. The failures that cost money show up between day two and day ten, when caches expire and crawlers come back.

One honest note about the day three traffic check: a modest dip after a redesign is normal while search engines recrawl and reassess. A sustained drop past two weeks is not. The difference between the two is the reason you took that crawl of the old site in step one.

Common Mistakes

• Launching on a Friday. Everything on the seven day list needs somebody watching. Launch Tuesday morning.
• Treating the redirect map as a post-launch task. By the time you notice, the crawler has already seen the 404s.
• Changing URLs because the new ones look nicer. There is no ranking benefit that offsets the risk.
• Testing forms while logged in as an administrator. Admins often bypass the exact caching and validation layer that is broken.
• Blocking all AI crawlers by reflex. You are choosing to disappear from ChatGPT search, usually without meaning to.
• Shipping without a rollback plan. The plan takes ten minutes to write and is the difference between a bad hour and a bad week.
• Assuming the host’s backup is enough. A backup that lives on the same server as the site is not a backup. It is a copy.

What This Looks Like On A Real Project

Hypothetical, to show the shape rather than to claim a result. A Calgary professional services firm replaces a nine year old site. The old site has 140 URLs; 22 of them carry essentially all the organic traffic and 11 have external links.

The new site has 30 pages. The right decision is not to redirect 140 URLs to 30 thoughtfully. It is to keep the 22 earning URLs at their original addresses wherever the new information architecture allows, map the 11 linked pages explicitly, redirect the genuinely dead ones to the nearest real equivalent, and let the remaining thin pages 410. That is maybe two hours of work in a spreadsheet and it is worth more than every design decision on the project combined.

Pros And Cons Of A Hard Cutover

For most Canadian service businesses the hard cutover is correct, and the phased approach adds risk rather than removing it.

FAQ

How Long Should A Website Launch Checklist Take?

About four to six hours for a 20 to 40 page site, assuming the redirect map was built during the project rather than on launch day. Add a week of light monitoring. If someone tells you it is a 20 minute job, they are checking that the site loads and calling it a launch.

Will I Lose Rankings When I Redesign My Website?

Not if URLs stay the same and content survives. Most ranking loss in a redesign comes from changed URLs without redirects, or from content being cut during the design process because it did not fit the new layout. A short dip while pages are recrawled is normal. A sustained drop is a bug, not a phase.

Should I Keep The Old Site Up Somewhere?

Keep a backup, not a live copy. A live duplicate on a staging subdomain that search engines can reach creates duplicate content competing with your real site. If you keep staging live, password protect it and block it in robots.txt.

What Is The Single Most Commonly Missed Item?

The staging noindex tag. It is check 16 on this list, it takes thirty seconds, and it is missed on a meaningful share of launches across the industry. Second place goes to form notifications landing in spam because nobody tested from outside the building.

Do I Need To Resubmit My Sitemap After Launch?

Submit it once in Search Console after the new site is live. You do not need to ping search engines repeatedly. Google deprecated its sitemap ping endpoint in June 2023 and it now returns a 404, so any tool or tutorial still recommending it is out of date.

Who Should Own The Launch Checklist?

One named person, not the agency and the client jointly. Joint ownership of a checklist means nobody runs it. Whoever owns it should have access to DNS, the host, Search Console and analytics on launch day, not be requesting credentials during the cutover.

Conclusion

Most of what goes wrong at launch is not exotic. It is a noindex left on, a redirect map built in a hurry, and a form nobody submitted from a phone. The 40 checks above take an afternoon and they protect the only two things a new site is supposed to do: keep the traffic you already earned, and capture the leads it produces.

If you have a build in progress and want the migration handled properly rather than hoped through, our website packages include the redirect map and the post-launch monitoring as standard. Tell us what you are launching through our intake form and we will tell you which of these 40 your project actually needs to worry about.