Website Launch Checklist for Small Businesses

A website launch checklist is the short list of tests you run before a new site goes live and in the week after: check every page and link, send a real enquiry through each form, make sure search engines are allowed in, confirm the site is fast on a phone, and run basic accessibility checks. Most launch problems we see are small and easy to miss, such as a form that emails nobody or a setting that still hides the site from Google. This guide gives you the full pre-launch checklist in the order we work through it.

Key takeaways

• Before launch, send a test enquiry through every form and confirm it reaches the right inbox, including on a phone.
• Remove any staging noindex rule at launch: Google says a noindex page must not be blocked by robots.txt, or Google will never see the rule change.
• If you are replacing an old site, map every old URL to its new address and set up permanent (301) redirects before you switch.
• Google’s “good” Core Web Vitals targets are a Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, an Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less and a Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less.
• In the first week, add the site to Google Search Console, submit the sitemap and request indexing for your most important pages.

What should a website launch checklist include?

A good website launch checklist covers five areas: content, enquiries, search, speed and accessibility, plus a short list of things to do after launch. Design matters, but by launch day the design is usually settled. What breaks is the plumbing underneath it.

We split the checks into “before launch” (on the staging or preview version) and “launch week” (on the live address), because some checks only work once the real domain is in place.

What to check in your content before launch

Read every page as a customer would, on a phone first. You are looking for anything unfinished, out of date or unclear.

• No placeholder text or images. Search the site for “lorem ipsum”, “TBC” and “example.com”.
• Contact details match everywhere. Phone, email, address and opening hours should be identical on the site, your Google Business Profile and your email signature.
• Every page has one clear next step. A visitor should always know what to do next, whether that is calling, booking or sending an enquiry.
• Legal pages are in place. A privacy policy that names what your forms collect, and a cookie notice if you use non-essential cookies.
• Every link works. Click every menu item, button and footer link. A free link checker helps on bigger sites, but still click the main buttons yourself.

How to test your contact form and enquiry path

Send a real test enquiry through every form, on desktop and on a phone, and check that it arrives, where it arrives and how quickly. This is the single most important pre-launch check, because a broken form costs you enquiries silently.

1. Fill in each form with realistic details and submit it.
2. Confirm the notification reaches the inbox that actually gets read, and check the spam folder too.
3. Check the visitor sees a clear thank-you message and, if you send one, an automatic reply.
4. If the form feeds a CRM or spreadsheet, confirm the record appears with every field filled in.
5. Try leaving a required field empty to see that the error message is clear.

We cover the most common reasons forms fail in why your website is not getting enquiries, and how to send submissions straight into your system in how to connect your website form to a CRM.

What SEO checks should you do before a website goes live?

The essential SEO checks are: let search engines in, give every page a unique title and description, have a sitemap ready, and redirect old URLs if you are replacing a site. None of these take long, but missing one can keep a new site out of Google for weeks.

Remove the staging noindex

Most builders and developers hide the preview version from search with a noindex rule, set in a meta tag or an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header. That is right for staging and wrong for launch. Google’s documentation is clear that for noindex to work, the page must not be blocked by robots.txt, because a crawler that can’t reach the page never sees the rule. So at launch, remove the noindex from the live site and make sure robots.txt doesn’t block the pages you want found. When we launched our own site in October 2026, this was the first thing we checked on the live address: robots.txt open and listing the sitemap, while the staging preview kept its noindex header.

Titles, descriptions and headings

Every page needs its own title and meta description that say what the page is about, and one main heading. Duplicate titles such as “Home” on every page make it harder for search engines and people to tell your pages apart.

Sitemap

Most platforms create a sitemap automatically at /sitemap.xml. Check that it lists your real pages and not test ones. Google says you can submit it in Search Console or add a Sitemap: line to robots.txt, but that a sitemap is “merely a hint”, not a guarantee that pages will be crawled.

Redirects from the old site

If the new site replaces an old one and page addresses change, list every old URL and the new page it should point to. Google’s site move guide recommends preparing exactly this URL mapping, and notes that 301 and other permanent redirects don’t cause a loss in PageRank. Skip this step and old links, bookmarks and search results lead to error pages. If you are still deciding whether to rebuild at all, our guide to the signs your website needs a redesign can help.

How fast should a new website load?

Aim to pass Google’s Core Web Vitals: the main content should appear within 2.5 seconds, the page should respond to taps within 200 milliseconds, and the layout should not jump around as it loads (a Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less). Google measures these at the 75th percentile of page loads, on mobile and desktop separately.

Before launch you only have lab data, so run your key pages through PageSpeed Insights on the mobile setting. The usual fixes are compressing large images, removing unused scripts and plugins, and making sure images have set dimensions so the page doesn’t shift. Real-user data appears in Search Console once enough people have visited.

How do you check accessibility before launch?

Start with the W3C’s Easy Checks, a free first review that anyone can run in under an hour. It covers page titles, image alt text, headings, colour contrast, text resizing, keyboard access and visible focus, form labels and errors, moving content and multimedia alternatives.

Two quick tests catch a lot: press Tab to move through each page without a mouse, and zoom the browser to 200%. If you can’t reach a button with the keyboard, or the text overlaps when zoomed, fix it before launch. The W3C is clear that these checks are “designed to be quick and easy, rather than definitive”, so treat them as a floor, not a full audit.

What to do on launch day and in the first week

Once the site is live on its real domain, connect it to Google and watch it closely for a week.

1. Repeat the form test on the live domain. Email and form settings sometimes change when the domain does.
2. Check HTTPS: the padlock shows, and the http and non-www versions redirect to your main address.
3. Add the site to Google Search Console and submit your sitemap in the Sitemaps report. Our Google Search Console guide for beginners walks through setup.
4. Request indexing for your home page and main service pages with the URL Inspection tool. There is a daily limit per property, so start with the pages that matter most.
5. Update your listings: Google Business Profile, social profiles and directories should all link to the new site.
6. Check analytics is recording visits, if you use it.
7. Re-check after a week: look at Search Console’s page indexing report for errors and fix anything flagged.

If you also want AI assistants to find and describe your business accurately, the same foundations apply. See how to show up in AI search answers.

Next steps

If you would like a second pair of eyes before you go live, our website services include launch testing on every build, and we give a fixed quote before any work starts. Already live? Take the free website check to see what to fix first, or browse more website guides.

Sources

• Block Search indexing with noindex, Google Search Central
• Build and submit a sitemap, Google Search Central
• How to move a site, Google Search Central
• Web Vitals, web.dev (Google)
• Easy Checks: A First Review of Web Accessibility, W3C Web Accessibility Initiative
• URL Inspection tool, Search Console Help