Website launch checklist
A technical SEO and launch-day checklist tailored to your site.
- Launch date
- 2026-11-02
- The staging site is password-protected on the server, not only by robots.txt.
- Every page has one address; http, the www or non-www variant and the trailing slash redirect to it with a single 301 (...)
- Missing addresses return a real 404, not the home page with a 200.
- robots.txt blocks nothing by accident, including CSS and JavaScript files.
- The staging blocks and noindex are gone after launch.
- The sitemap lists only canonical addresses that return 200.
- Each page's canonical points to itself, with a full address and no staging domain.
- Every page has its own title, description and one H1.
- Links are <a href> tags and addresses do not use a hash (#).
- LocalBusiness with address, phone and opening hours.
- BreadcrumbList on subpages.
- Every old address has a 301 to its closest counterpart (see the migration checklist).
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When to use the launch checklist
If the site has a staging version,
then lock it with a server-level password, not with robots.txt. Robots.txt blocks crawling, not indexing.
If the site is a JavaScript app,
then the content and links have to be in the HTML the crawler receives, not only after JavaScript has run.
If the new site replaces an old one,
then every old address needs a 301 redirect to its closest equivalent. Migration checklist
If a vendor builds the site,
then add the checklist items to your brief or scope, so every vendor quotes the same thing and they can be verified at acceptance. Website brief
What next: the list before, on and after launch day
Most of the work is done before launch, but every later deployment can change a template, the base URL or the server configuration.
In the project scope
The checklist items in place of "SEO optimisation" give a description that can be verified at acceptance.
On launch day
Blocks removed, address variants, a real 404, the sitemap submitted in Search Console.
The first weeks
Crawling can take from a few days to a few weeks. The Page indexing report shows what Google knows and why it hasn't indexed something.
After every major change
The same items are checked again, because a CMS plugin can add its own tags.
Questions
First about what happens to what you type, then about the document itself.
Got the document ready?
Send it to us with your question. We reply within an hour with a quote.