A launch is a production change with user, search and business risk. The checklist should identify evidence, owners and recovery steps, not only whether someone remembers clicking through the homepage.
Content and ownership
Confirm approved copy, images, contact details, legal information, authors, dates, downloads and the person responsible for each changing item.
- No placeholders
- No invented claims
- Useful alt text
- Working downloads
- Approved contact details
Journeys and forms
Test navigation, search where present, forms, error states, email delivery, payment or application paths and external integrations on real responsive sizes.
Search controls
Verify status codes, canonicals, titles, descriptions, headings, structured data, redirects, robots and sitemap output on the deployed host.
- One canonical per page
- No preview host indexation
- Redirect map verified
- Sitemap returns successful URLs
- Structured data matches visible content
Accessibility
Complete keyboard journeys, review focus, headings, contrast, labels, errors, zoom and status messages. Record known limitations instead of making an unsupported compliance claim.
Performance and resilience
Run production-mode measurements, inspect large images and scripts, test failure states, confirm monitoring and document how to roll back or recover.
Privacy and analytics
Confirm the privacy and cookie notices match the actual deployment. Do not load non-essential analytics before valid consent. Test preference withdrawal and event naming.
After release
Check the public domain, DNS, certificates, forms, logs, crawl behaviour and Search Console. Continue watching enquiries, errors and field performance after the initial launch window.