Website launch checklist

Launch day has a talent for finding the one thing nobody checked. Split the questions below between a few people a couple of days before you go live, while there's still time to fix what turns up.

Is anything left over from the build?

Hunt for placeholder text. Lorem ipsum, a heading that still says TBD, a testimonial from "Jane Doe". They hide in footers and on pages nobody opened during the build. While you're there, compare product names, plan names and prices with what sales and billing use today, because the website tends to be the last thing to hear about a change.

Then get someone who didn't write the copy to read it. After the third draft, writers genuinely can't see their own typos.

Does every link go somewhere?

Click them all, the dull ones included. The privacy policy, the careers link, the email address in the footer, the logo that's meant to go home. A broken footer link won't sink a launch, but it's the kind of thing a prospect notices.

Does it hold up on other screens?

Drag your browser from phone width to a big monitor and watch what breaks. Images should stay sharp and keep their shape. Then go looking for the states nobody designs until the end, like the empty state, the failed form and the thank you page. Seeing each of them once is enough to catch the worst surprises.

Will search engines and Slack show it properly?

Each page needs its own title and description. Paste a couple of links into Slack and look at the preview. Make sure staging didn't leave anything set to noindex, which is a classic, and that old URLs redirect if pages moved.

Is tracking actually working?

Open a private window, accept cookies and click around, then check that the visit turned up in analytics. Do a test sign up or demo request and confirm the event arrives once. Not zero times, not three. Then try declining cookies and make sure nothing sneaks through anyway.

Do the forms and pages really work?

Submit every form and follow it all the way to wherever it's supposed to end up, whether that's an inbox, a CRM or a Slack channel. Try the site signed in, signed out and in a browser you don't normally use. Load the main pages on your phone over mobile data. A glance at the browser console catches errors users never report.

Running the check as a team

The questions are the easy part. Collecting what five people find is harder, and five spreadsheets plus a Slack thread is exactly how a typo survives launch.

There's more on running reviews this way in our post on website audits.