The pre-launch checklist I run on every website

Launching a website is easy. Launching one that actually works for every visitor, on every device, and shows up correctly when it's shared — that's the part people skip. Here's what I check before anything goes live.

Content accuracy

• Every phone number, email, and address matches what's on the business's Google listing, exactly — mismatches quietly hurt local search rankings.
• No leftover placeholder text, lorem ipsum, or "coming soon" sections left behind from the build process.
• Every image has real, descriptive alt text — not just for accessibility, but because it's one more thing search engines use to understand the page.

Technical basics

• Every page has a unique title and meta description — not the same one copy-pasted across the site.
• A sitemap and robots.txt exist and actually point at the live domain.
• A custom 404 page exists, so a broken link doesn't dead-end a visitor.
• HTTPS is active and the certificate is valid — an unencrypted site gets flagged by every modern browser.

How it actually behaves

• Every form actually sends somewhere real, and I test it myself before calling it done — not just checking that it "looks" like it submitted.
• The site is tested on an actual phone, not just a resized browser window — real mobile browsers behave differently.
• The browser console is checked for errors on every page — a broken script can silently break something a visitor never sees you fix.
• Every internal link is clicked at least once. Broken internal links are one of the most common, most avoidable launch mistakes.

How it looks when shared

• Sharing the link in a message preview (WhatsApp, Facebook, LinkedIn) shows the right title, description, and image — not a blank card or the wrong page's info.
• The favicon actually shows up in the browser tab, instead of a generic default icon.

None of this is glamorous. It's also exactly the stuff that, when skipped, quietly costs a business real inquiries — a broken form no one notices for weeks, a phone number that doesn't match anywhere else online, a share link that looks broken the first time someone sends it to a friend.