Article
Checklist: 12 things to do before you launch anything online
2 min read
On this page
Launch day is a bad time to discover a broken form. Run this list the day before — all twelve items take an afternoon, and every one of them is something people routinely ship without.
Does it work?
1. Click every link, on the live site. Not on your local copy. Internal links, footer links, social icons, the one in your bio.
2. Submit your own contact form. Then check the inbox it's supposed to land in — including spam. A form that silently fails is worse than no form.
3. Open it on a real phone. Not a resized browser window. Check the menu, the buttons, and whether anything scrolls sideways.
4. Load it on mobile data with the cache empty. If your homepage takes eight seconds on 4G, that's your actual homepage for a large share of visitors.
Can anyone find it?
5. Check the page titles. Every page needs its own descriptive title. "Home" and "Untitled" are what most launches ship with.
6. Write the meta descriptions. One sentence per important page. This is the text people read in search results before deciding whether you exist.
7. Set the social preview image. Paste your URL into a chat and look at the card. A broken preview costs you clicks on every share, forever.
8. Make sure you're not blocking search engines. Staging sites carry a "noindex" flag, and it is remarkably easy to launch with it still on.
Will you know what happened?
9. Install analytics and verify it records you. Load the site, then check that the visit shows up. Half of installed analytics tools were never verified.
10. Decide what "success" means this month. One number: signups, enquiries, sales. Without it you'll be reading traffic charts with nothing to compare them against.
Can you recover?
11. Take a backup and know how to restore it. A backup you've never restored is a hope, not a backup.
12. Write down your own access. Domain registrar, hosting, DNS, analytics — where they are and who holds them. The most common launch disaster isn't technical; it's a domain registered on an email nobody can open any more.
That's the twelve. If you're at the earlier stage — deciding what to build and how — the full guide runs from planning to a live domain: Build and launch your first website.
