What Does a Website Need Before It Goes Live?

Launch day is when a website stops being a project and starts being something customers rely on. It's also when small oversights become public: a form that sends to nobody, old links that lead to error pages, a site Google has been told not to index.

Most of these are quick to fix before launch and surprisingly costly after it. This is the checklist we work through before any site goes live, written so you can use it whoever is building yours.

What does a website need before it goes live?

Before launch, a website needs finished and checked content, working forms and integrations, the SEO basics in place, redirects from any old URLs, analytics with proper consent, the legal pages a UK business needs, and testing across devices, browsers and accessibility. Then the domain, security and backups need confirming, and someone needs to know how to run it.

Each of these is covered below, with a checklist for each area.

Is the content actually finished?

Placeholder text, test images and outdated details are the most common launch mistakes, and the most visible. Read every page as a customer would, on a phone as well as a laptop, and check that the content answers the questions people actually arrive with.

Do the forms and integrations work?

Test every form on the live domain, not just in development, because email delivery often depends on the domain's settings. Submit each one, confirm the message arrives where it should, check any automatic reply, and make sure enquiries also land in the CRM or inbox your team actually uses.

Is the site ready for search engines?

A new site needs to tell search engines what each page is and that they're allowed to index it. Check every page has a unique title and description, a sitemap exists and is submitted (opens Google Search Central in a new tab), and nothing left over from development is blocking indexing. This one is easy to miss, because a site that's hidden from Google looks completely normal to everyone else.

Have you set up redirects from the old site?

If the new site replaces an old one, every old URL that still gets visits or links should redirect to its closest new page (opens Google Search Central in a new tab). Without redirects, people following old links and search results land on error pages, and the rankings the old pages had earned are lost. It's one of the most important launch tasks and one of the most often forgotten.

If the old site has no full list of its pages, archive services like the Wayback Machine and old sitemaps can usually piece one together. Map each old URL to the most relevant new page, not just the homepage, and test them all once the site is live.

Does it work for everyone, on every device?

Test on real phones and tablets as well as desktop, in the main browsers, and check the basics of accessibility (opens W3C in a new tab). A site that works perfectly on the designer's screen can still break on an older phone, a narrow window or a keyboard.

This is where UX thinking pays off. A site designed around real user journeys, as we covered in Why UX Design Matters More Than Ever in AI-Assisted Development, has far fewer surprises at this stage.

Are analytics and cookie consent set up properly?

You'll want to know how the site performs from day one, so analytics should be live at launch. In the UK, analytics and marketing cookies need consent before they're set (opens ICO in a new tab), so the cookie banner has to actually block them until a visitor agrees, not just display a message.

• Analytics installed and recording visits on the live domain.
• Key actions tracked, such as form submissions, calls and bookings.
• Cookie banner blocks non-essential cookies until consent is given.
• Google Search Console set up and the sitemap submitted.

What legal pages does a UK business website need?

At a minimum, a privacy policy explaining what data you collect and why, and a cookie policy if you use non-essential cookies. Limited companies also need to show their registered company name, number and registered office address (opens GOV.UK in a new tab) on the site, usually in the footer or on a legal page.

Are the domain, security and backups in place?

Check the domain points to the new site in both its www and non-www forms, the SSL certificate is active so every page loads over HTTPS, and backups are running. Make sure the business, not just the agency or developer, has access to the domain, hosting and CMS accounts.

Does your team know how to run the site?

A website isn't finished at launch. Whoever updates it needs to know how to add pages, edit content and publish safely, and who to call when something needs changing. A short CMS walkthrough, and a written guide for the common tasks, saves a lot of support emails later.

If you're still choosing how the site should be built, Choosing the Right Tech Stack for Your Website or Web App covers how the CMS choice affects this.

Can AI do the launch checks for you?

It can do a lot of them. Automated tools and AI are good at finding broken links, missing alt text, slow pages, absent metadata and common accessibility problems, and they're quicker and more thorough than checking by hand. Use them.

What they can't judge is whether the site feels right: whether the first impression is the one you intended, whether the journey makes sense to a new customer, whether the tone sounds like your business. That last read-through, done by someone who cares about the brand, is still the most valuable check on the list.

What should happen after launch?

The first few weeks after launch are when you learn how people really use the site. Watch Search Console for indexing errors, check the redirects are being picked up, keep an eye on form enquiries and analytics, and fix anything that turns up quickly. Then keep improving it based on what the data tells you.