What to check before a website goes live

Launch day is when small oversights become expensive silences. A form that sends nowhere, a redirect nobody set up, a tracking tag that was never installed: none announce themselves, and all of them cost money for months.

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Before launch, verify five things in order: a stranger understands what you do within seconds, the contact path works end to end on a real phone, tracking records enquiries and calls, every old URL redirects to its equivalent, and the pages that were producing enquiries still exist. Everything else can be fixed later; these five are expensive to discover late.

Check one: can a stranger understand it?

Before anything technical, run the simplest test. Show the top of the homepage and the main service page to somebody outside the business, for five seconds each, on a phone. Ask what you do and who for.

This costs ten minutes and is the check most often skipped, because by launch day everybody involved is too close to the material to see it. If strangers hesitate, fix that before you fix anything else, because it affects every visitor the site will ever receive.

Check two: does the contact path actually work?

Complete a real enquiry yourself, from a phone, on mobile data, as a customer would. Then confirm that the message arrived somewhere a person will see it, that the automatic confirmation is sent, and that the reply address works.

Forms that silently fail are more common than anybody expects, and nothing tells you it is happening. The enquiries simply never arrive, and the site looks like it is not working when in fact it is working perfectly up to the last step.

  • Submit the form and confirm the message lands in a monitored inbox.
  • Check the automatic confirmation actually sends, and reads well.
  • Tap the phone number on a phone and confirm it dials.
  • Test any booking flow to the final confirmation step.
  • Send a test to a spam-prone address, since confirmations often land there.

Check three: is anything being recorded?

If tracking is not in place on day one, the first months of the site are unmeasurable, and those are exactly the months you will later want to compare against.

Confirm that form submissions and taps on the phone number are recorded as events, not merely that analytics is installed. Installing analytics and never configuring events is the usual state of affairs, and it produces reports full of visits and empty of outcomes.

Check four: are the old addresses redirected?

This applies whenever a site replaces an existing one, and it is where the most damage happens. Every page address that existed before must point to its closest equivalent on the new site, permanently. Not to the homepage, which search engines treat as a soft failure.

Export the full list of old addresses before launch, map each one, and test a sample after going live. Years of accumulated visibility can disappear in an afternoon, and recovering it takes far longer than preventing the loss.

Check five: did you keep what was working?

A new site is usually shorter than the one it replaces, because shorter feels cleaner. But the paragraphs somebody removed for tidiness were often the ones answering the specific questions that brought people from search.

Before launch, confirm the pages that were producing enquiries still exist, still say the specific things they said, and are still reachable in a click or two from the homepage.

  • List the pages that produced enquiries on the old site.
  • Confirm each one exists on the new site, with its detail intact.
  • Check the internal links to them survived the rebuild.
  • Keep the wording that matched real searches, even if it feels wordy.

The quiet breakers worth a final pass

A short sweep catches the rest: images that were never compressed and now weigh several megabytes, a robots file left blocking the whole site from a staging environment, a page still carrying a noindex tag, a copyright year that is already out of date, and links that point to the old domain.

Each is a two-minute fix before launch and a mystery afterwards. The noindex tag left in place is the most expensive of them, because everything looks perfect and nothing gets indexed at all.

How Licheo launches

Nothing goes live until you have seen it. Redirects are mapped as part of the launch rather than promised afterwards, tracking is configured before the first visitor arrives, and the whole contact path is completed on a phone by a person.

For the weeks after launch the enquiry numbers are watched closely, because problems show up there before they appear in any ranking report.

Part of a larger guide

This page is one part of Websites that make money. The other parts:

Questions people ask

What should I check before launching a website?
Five things, in order: a stranger understands the message in seconds, the contact path works end to end on a real phone, tracking records enquiries and calls, every old URL redirects to its equivalent, and the pages that were producing enquiries still exist.
Why do forms fail silently?
Because nothing reports the failure. The address was mistyped, the confirmation went to spam, or a plugin changed. The only reliable check is to submit a real enquiry yourself and confirm it arrives where a person will see it.
What happens if I forget redirects?
Every address that existed before starts returning nothing, and the visibility built up over years goes with it. Redirecting everything to the homepage is not a fix; search engines treat that as a soft failure and drop the pages anyway.
Should I launch without analytics configured?
Try not to. Without events recording enquiries and calls from day one, the first months are unmeasurable, and those are the months you will most want as a baseline later.
What is the most expensive launch mistake?
A noindex tag left over from staging. The site looks perfect to every human who visits and stays invisible to search engines, sometimes for months, because nothing on the page signals that anything is wrong.

Launch without the expensive surprises

Redirects mapped, tracking configured, contact path tested by a person, and nothing published until you have seen it.

Talk to us about your launch See how Licheo builds