Five things I check before every website launch

What's the worst thing that's gone wrong on your launch day? If you've ever launched a website, you'll know the feeling. Every agency has war stories about launch-day disasters. I've had my share, a missing redirect that sent 40% of organic traffic to 404 pages, a contact form that validated on the frontend but didn't actually send emails, an OG image that showed the development server's URL when shared on LinkedIn. Each of those mistakes taught me something, and over time I've distilled my pre-launch process into five non-negotiable checks.

1. Redirects and broken links

If the new site is replacing an existing one, every URL that has external links or organic traffic needs a redirect. Not just the main pages, the blog posts, the PDF downloads, the old campaign landing pages. I export the existing site's URL structure from Google Search Console (the Pages report gives you every indexed URL), crawl it with Screaming Frog, and map every URL that receives traffic to its new equivalent. We then test every redirect before launch. The number of relaunched sites that haemorrhage traffic because nobody set up redirects is staggering.

2. Forms and transactional emails

Every form on the site gets tested end-to-end in the production environment, not just staging. I submit real test entries and verify that: the submission is stored or emailed correctly, the notification email reaches the right inbox (not spam), any autoresponder emails send with correct content and formatting, validation works for both valid and invalid inputs, and the thank-you page or confirmation message displays correctly. I've caught issues where forms worked perfectly on staging but failed in production because an environment variable wasn't set or the mail service wasn't configured.

3. Open Graph and social sharing

When someone shares a link to the site on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Slack, the preview card needs to look right. I check every key page with Facebook's Sharing Debugger and Twitter's Card Validator (now X, but the tool still works). The things that go wrong: missing OG images, OG titles showing the site name instead of the page title, descriptions pulling in the wrong text, images that are the wrong aspect ratio and get cropped badly. It takes twenty minutes to check and saves the embarrassment of the client sharing their shiny new site and getting a broken preview.

4. Performance on a real connection

Running Lighthouse on a MacBook Pro over a fibre connection tells you nothing useful about how the site performs for real users. I test using WebPageTest with a 4G connection profile from a location relevant to the client's audience. I check LCP, CLS, and INP specifically, because these are the Core Web Vitals that Google uses for ranking. If any of them fail on the test profile, we fix them before launch. It's far easier to address performance before launch than after, when the client is already sharing the URL and expecting it to work.

5. Analytics and tracking

Is the analytics tag firing on every page? Is it firing only after cookie consent? Are the key events tracked, form submissions, phone clicks, PDF downloads? Is the data appearing in the correct GA4 property (not the development one)? I use Google Tag Manager's preview mode to verify every tag, trigger, and variable. I also check that no tracking fires before consent is given, this is a legal requirement, not a nice-to-have, and it's remarkably easy to get wrong.

None of these checks are glamorous, and none of them individually take more than an hour. So why do people skip them? But skipping them is how you get the Monday-morning phone call from a client whose site launched on Friday and has been quietly losing traffic, leads, or reputation all weekend.

If you're approaching a launch and want a second pair of eyes on your pre-launch checklist, I'm happy to help, just reach out.