Website launch checklist: before and after go-live

A launch goes wrong in small, boring ways: a noindex left over from staging, a menu link that still points at the old host, a certificate on www but not the apex. None of it shows up on the homepage you have been staring at for a month. This is the list to run through, in order, with the tool that does each check.

The day before

Run these on the real host, with the real DNS, in a private window. Staging has already passed. Staging is not what launches.

Crawl it once

Paste the public URL into SiteCheck (opens in a new tab) and read the report. The free scan covers up to 25 pages, with no account and no card. That is enough to catch a broken template, because a template error repeats on every page it renders. What each finding means is in what a website health report covers.

Fix anything in these groups before you touch copy:

• Broken links and HTTP errors. A 404 in the navigation on launch day is the first thing a visitor finds.
• Redirect chains and loops. Old URL to new URL in one hop. A chain of three slows the page and loses crawl budget. A loop never loads. See how to find and fix redirect chains and loops.
• TLS. The certificate is valid for the hostname people type, and for www as well as the apex if both answer.
• Mixed content. No http:// image, script, or font on an https:// page.

Check you are allowed to be found

• robots.txt exists, parses, and does not block the whole site or the CSS. A staging rule that says Disallow: / is the classic launch-day mistake.
• No noindex on pages you want indexed. A CMS toggle or a plugin default can leave one on the homepage.
• sitemap.xml exists, lists live URLs, and is referenced from robots.txt.
• One canonical URL per page, pointing at the host and scheme you are launching on.

SiteCheck reports all four. If the report says the site is hidden, believe it before you believe the CMS settings screen.

The basics on every page

Unique title, a meta description, and one H1. These are not ranking tricks. They are what a search result, a shared link, and a screen reader show first. Duplicates usually mean a template field was never filled in.

Watch the certificate from now on

Put the public URL on a SignalWatch (opens in a new tab) monitor. The same monitor tells you when the visible text changes, when the page goes down and recovers, and when the certificate is inside 14 days of expiry, then again at 3 days. Free: 3 monitors, a check every 15 minutes, no card. Most certificate incidents are a renewal job that quietly stopped, months after launch, when nobody is looking. Details are in how to monitor TLS certificate expiry.

Launch day

1. Flip DNS or the proxy. Confirm http:// redirects to https://, and that www and the apex settle on one host.
2. Load the homepage, one page of each template, and the contact or checkout path. Click, do not assume.
3. Re-run the SiteCheck scan on the live host. The pre-launch run was on the same files, but DNS, the proxy, and the certificate are new.
4. Submit the sitemap in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

The week after

Baseline the links

Once the site is the one visitors are using and the redirects are in place, verify it in Mortise (opens in a new tab) and run the first crawl. That crawl is silent. It stores which links work. Later crawls alert only after a link that worked fails twice as 404 or 410. Free: 1 verified site, 200 pages per crawl, one manual check a day, no card. The order of work is in how to find newly broken links after a website migration.

Do the baseline after the launch-day fixes, not before. A baseline full of known mistakes is a quiet start, but the point is to store the site as you meant it.

Watch your own key pages

Add your pricing page, or whichever page a wrong edit would cost you, to SignalWatch. You get a unified diff by email, Slack, Discord, or an HMAC-signed JSON webhook when the text changes. An accidental edit by a colleague becomes visible the same hour instead of the next quarter.

Decide what is recurring

• A one-off cleanup list: the free SiteCheck scan was enough.
• A site you look after weekly: SiteCheck Starter ($9/month or $90/year) re-scans one site weekly; Pro ($19/month or $190/year) scans up to five sites daily.
• Link regressions only: Mortise Free, or Pro ($12/month or $79/year) for a schedule and email or webhook alerts.

Checklist

• SiteCheck report on the live host: no broken links, HTTP errors, redirect chains, loops, or mixed content.
• robots.txt, sitemap.xml, noindex, and canonicals say what you meant.
• Unique title, description, and one H1 per template.
• Certificate valid on every public hostname, and monitored for expiry.
• http to https, and www to apex (or the reverse), in one hop.
• Mortise baseline taken after the launch-day fixes.
• SignalWatch on the pages you would be annoyed to see edited.