Confirm the final content
Read the site as a visitor, not as the person who wrote it. Check names, dates, contact details, pricing statements, calls to action, downloads and legal information.
Make sure placeholder copy, sample images and draft labels are gone. Review page titles and headings against the actual page purpose. A polished homepage does not compensate for an unfinished contact or privacy page.
Test links and forms
Check navigation, logo links, buttons, text links, downloads, social profiles and footer links. Include external links and any old campaign URLs that should redirect.
Submit every form on the live configuration. Verify validation, consent text, confirmation messages, notifications, CRM or inbox delivery and the person responsible for responding. Test failure behaviour as well as success.
Check mobile and basic accessibility
Review the primary pages at small, medium and large widths. Look for clipped navigation, overlapping controls, horizontal scrolling, unreadable text and media that changes the layout.
Use a keyboard for the main journey. Confirm visible focus, descriptive labels, useful alternative text, logical heading order and sufficient contrast. Zoom the page and check that content remains usable.
Review titles, descriptions and indexing
Every indexable page should have a descriptive title, one main heading, a useful meta description and a self-referencing canonical URL. Confirm the preferred hostname and trailing-slash convention are consistent.
Check robots directives, robots.txt and sitemap.xml. Remove noindex from pages intended for search, and keep staging, private or duplicate routes out of the index. Map changed URLs to specific redirects rather than sending everything to the homepage.
The broader go-live checklist guide explains how these checks fit into the release decision.
Verify analytics, consent and legal pages
Confirm that analytics loads according to the chosen consent model and that key actions are recorded once. Test the consent banner and settings control, including refusal and withdrawal.
Make sure privacy, cookie, terms and company information reflect the services actually used. Legal requirements vary by market, so treat this as an implementation check, not legal advice.
Check performance and browser behaviour
Load representative pages on a real phone and an ordinary connection. Optimise oversized images, unnecessary scripts, blocked fonts and layout shifts that materially slow or disrupt the experience.
Test the current versions of the browsers that matter to the audience. Pay particular attention to forms, menus, sticky elements, video and embedded third-party content.
Confirm domain, SSL, redirects and backups
Verify DNS, the final domain, HTTPS and certificate status. Check redirects from HTTP, alternate hostnames and replaced URLs. Confirm the favicon and social sharing metadata on the production hostname.
Keep a recoverable copy of the previous site or deployment configuration. Know who can restore it if the launch introduces a serious problem.
Do a live verification
After publishing, repeat the primary journey on the public URL. Submit a form, inspect an analytics event, open key pages from search-like entry points and check redirects. Watch error monitoring or server logs if available.
Record known issues and owners before announcing completion. If the site will be transferred to another team, use the software project handover checklist to transfer accounts, domains and operational knowledge.
For an authenticated application or integration-heavy platform, switch to the advanced web project launch checklist instead of extending this list indefinitely.