Business Website Launch Checklist

1. Check the offer and the important pages.

Read the site as someone who has never heard of the business. Make sure the offer, contact details, prices or quote process, and next steps are understandable. Remove placeholder copy and claims you cannot support. Check that important links work and that missing pages return a proper not-found response.

• Company and contact information is correct.
• Each service or product has a useful explanation.
• Navigation and calls to action lead to the intended destination.
• Privacy and terms describe the actual collection and sale process.

2. Try the site on a phone and a keyboard.

Check real content at narrow and wide screen sizes. Text should be readable, forms should have labels, and buttons should be easy to reach. Use the keyboard to move through navigation, forms and dialogs. Content should remain understandable if motion is reduced or a decorative animation does not run.

• No horizontal scrolling hides important text or controls.
• Focus is visible and interactive controls have understandable names.
• Images have appropriate alternative text, or are marked decorative.
• Loading images and banners do not unexpectedly move the page.

3. Follow an enquiry, booking or purchase to completion.

Use test data and an agreed test-payment mode where available. Check the information the business receives as well as the customer’s confirmation. If the business accepts payment, test a failed or interrupted payment too. A retry should not accidentally produce a duplicate fulfilment, and a changed booking should show the latest details.

• Forms validate the required details and show a useful result.
• The right staff inbox or system receives the request.
• Customer confirmations contain the right order or booking information.
• Refund, cancellation and subscription changes have an agreed process.

4. Review customer and administrator access.

With written permission for the systems involved, an authorised reviewer can use separate test accounts to check which records and actions each role can access. Review sign-in and recovery as well as the ordinary account screen. Do not test against another business’s systems or use real customer information for a demonstration.

• Customer records are separated according to the intended permissions.
• Staff and administrators have only the access their roles need.
• Administrator accounts use the protection supported by the platform.
• Test accounts and temporary access have a removal plan.

5. Make recovery and ownership practical.

Identify who controls the domain, hosting, code and third-party services. Confirm that the business can access those accounts without relying on one contractor. A backup is only useful if it includes the necessary data and can be restored, so agree a safe restore check and a person responsible for recovery.

• Domain and provider ownership are documented.
• The release has an agreed rollback or recovery path.
• Backups cover the data needed to resume the business workflow.
• A support contact and escalation process are available.

6. Check what search engines can see.

The live pages should have descriptive titles, useful text, the intended canonical URLs and crawlable internal links. Confirm that production is not marked noindex. Keep private application and administrative areas out of search results. Submit the production sitemap in Google Search Console and check important pages with URL Inspection after deployment.

• Public pages load successfully on the preferred HTTPS domain.
• The sitemap contains real public URLs rather than previews or broken pages.
• Structured data describes visible, accurate page content.
• Search Console and performance measurements have an accountable owner.

7. Decide what is ready, and record what is still open.

Make the launch decision from a written list. Separate a broken payment or exposed record from an optional design improvement, assign an owner to each issue and keep evidence of the re-check. A checklist is a starting point for an assessment, not a certification or a guarantee that every possible problem has been found.