Launching a New Website? Don't Forget These Essential Steps!

Everything you need to check before taking your new website live - plus a handy checklist to ensure nothing slips through the cracks.

Hey marketer! 👋🏻

Most articles and advice focus mainly on building websites. Far fewer cover the actual launch process. But launching a site isn’t just about clicking “publish” - it’s a process where you need to check quite a lot of things. And if you don’t do this often, it’s easy to forget something important. That’s why I’ve prepared this overview of the most crucial things to monitor when releasing your new website into the wild (or making significant changes to an existing one). Let’s go through it together, and at the end, you’ll find a simple checklist so you won’t miss anything.

You might argue as a marketer that this is the web developer’s or supplier’s job. That you can’t control everything and it falls under someone else’s expertise. From my perspective, though, these are things that directly impact your website’s performance, and therefore the marketer is primarily responsible for ensuring they’re done right. Most importantly, you should want everything to be perfect - and you should know how to verify it.

Let’s take it step by step.

📝 Content Check

This is absolutely fundamental. Before releasing your website to the world, thoroughly review all text. I’m not reinventing the wheel here - I know it’s basic. But notice how many nonsensical things you encounter on websites. Development versions often use placeholder text, and sometimes some gets forgotten - especially on subpages you don’t check as often. The longer you stare at something, the easier it is to overlook mistakes.

Also delete any content that doesn’t belong on the website. All sample posts, empty pages, and similar junk.

Review all images - are they the right quality? Are they named correctly (without spaces and special characters)? Don’t forget about icons (including the favicon for your website).

Pay special attention to checking links. Each one should lead exactly where it’s supposed to. This includes both internal links between pages on your site and external links to social media or other websites.

💡 For WordPress sites, you can use this link checker plugin.

😁 For a laugh, check out how many people don’t delete the sample WordPress post.

📊 SEO Basics

Even if it’s not primarily a performance-focused website, the basics should always be done right. Every page needs its unique meta title and description - these appear in search results and should clearly state what visitors will find on the page.

Also important is properly configuring your robots.txt file (which tells search engines what to index and what not to) and having a sitemap.xml file (which shows them your site’s structure).

If you had indexing disabled during development (which is correct), don’t forget to enable it before launch.

💡 Know about this useful browser extension? It makes checking basic SEO a breeze.

😁 Even the default website tagline should be customized - not everyone does this.

⚙️ Technical Matters

You can’t afford to overlook anything in this area. An SSL certificate is standard today, and visitors expect it - they consider sites without one untrustworthy.

Also watch out for redirecting the website address with and without www. Do both work?

Test all forms thoroughly! Do they actually send? Do notifications arrive at the correct email? If you’re using an SMTP server, is it configured correctly?

The website must work perfectly on all devices - so thoroughly test it on mobile, tablet, laptop, and large monitor. What looks great on your computer might be broken on another device. You should physically click through everything on different devices.

💡 You can easily get screenshots in different browsers, devices, and resolutions.

⏱️ Speed and Performance

Website speed is more important today than ever. Proper cache settings will help with loading speed, while compression helps with image sizes. Test your site using tools like PageSpeed Insights or Pingdom - you’ll see where the weak spots are.

Analytics are your eyes on the website - without them, you won’t know how visitors behave and what needs improvement. So set up Google Analytics (or Matomo) right away.

Don’t forget the cookie consent banner, which is required today.

And if you’re replacing an old website with a new one, set up proper redirects so you don’t lose traffic from old links.

💡 To find all your website’s URLs that search engines know about, search using the query site:yourwebsite.com.

🔍 Measuring and Tracking

After launch, you need to know how your website is performing. Add it to Google Search Console and other relevant tools for your market. If you’re planning advertising campaigns, install all necessary tracking pixels right away - adding them later is an unnecessary complication.

After a week of operation, verify how (and if) search engines are indexing your website - just enter “site:yourwebsite.com” into Google. Are pages showing up? Do you see any movement in Search Console or tools like Collabim?

For better insight into actual visitor behavior, I recommend installing a tool like Smartlook. Especially in the first days, it can reveal problems you wouldn’t notice otherwise. And if you’re launching a major campaign right away, add customer chat or another quick contact option to your website. If there’s a serious problem, visitors will let you know immediately.

It’s also good to proactively ask people during the first days or weeks - especially those who contacted you through the website.

💡 You can set calendar reminders to check that everything’s working, indexing properly, and to review user recordings. That way you won’t have to keep thinking about it.

✅ Pre-Launch Website Checklist

Content
□ Text review
□ Check pages, posts
□ Check images, quality, and naming
□ Check all links

SEO
□ Meta descriptions and titles
□ Robots.txt
□ Sitemap.xml
□ Indexing enabled

Technical
□ SSL certificate
□ Check address with and without www
□ Form submissions
□ Testing on different devices

Performance
□ Cache settings
□ Image compression
□ Analytics
□ Cookie consent banner
□ Redirects

Measurement
□ Google Search Console
□ Local search tools
□ Campaign tracking pixels
□ Indexing verification

Nice to Have
□ Smartlook or similar tool
□ Chat for quick contact
□ Feedback collection

Well, that’s quite a lot in the end, isn’t it? If you think of other important points - feel free to write me or add them in the comments below the article. I’ll be happy to include them. But these seem essential to me.

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See you in the next article!

Jan Barborik

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