Website Launch SEO Checklist

How to use this checklist

Work through it in phases: planning before design starts, staging while the site is being built, the week before launch, launch day itself, and the month after. The single most expensive mistake is discovering the redirect map on launch day. Build it while the old site is still live and you still have the data.

If you are launching a first website with no history, skip section 3 and the redirect items in section 4; everything else applies.

1. Before design starts

1. You have written down what the new site must do: which enquiries, from which people, for which services.
2. Keyword research is done and mapped to pages, one page per search intent, before anybody draws a layout.
3. The page inventory exists: every page the new site will have, and which old page it replaces.
4. The URL structure is decided and short. Changing URLs without a reason is optional damage; keep the old URLs wherever the page survives.
5. The navigation follows how customers think, and the money pages sit within three clicks of the homepage.
6. Content is being written to the brief rather than after the design is signed off. Design around real copy, not filler.
7. Hosting is chosen for server response time, not only price, and sits sensibly close to your main audience.
8. The developer knows SEO is part of the acceptance criteria, in writing.

2. While the site is being built (staging)

1. Staging is blocked from indexing by HTTP authentication, not only by robots.txt or a noindex tag, so it cannot leak into search.
2. Every template has a unique, editable title tag and meta description field.
3. Exactly one H1 per template, editable.
4. Images can be given alt text and are compressed on upload.
5. Canonical tags are self-referencing and editable.
6. The theme does not generate duplicate archive, tag or author pages you do not want indexed.
7. Pagination, filters and search results are handled and not left generating unlimited crawlable URLs.
8. The content management system lets a non-developer edit copy, headings and links without a ticket.
9. Schema markup is built into the templates: Organization or LocalBusiness, Article, Service, Product, BreadcrumbList.
10. Speed is tested on staging on a real phone on mobile data, not on office wifi on a laptop.

3. The redirect map (rebuilds and redesigns)

1. Crawl the live site and export every URL, including images and PDFs.
2. Export every URL that received an impression or click in the last 16 months from Search Console, and every landing page from analytics.
3. Export the URLs that have external links pointing at them, since those are the ones carrying the authority.
4. Combine the three lists and remove duplicates. That combined list, not the sitemap, is what must be redirected.
5. Map every old URL to the single most relevant new URL. One to one wherever possible.
6. Never mass-redirect old pages to the homepage. Google treats those as soft 404s and the rankings go with them.
7. Where no relevant page exists, decide deliberately: recreate the content, redirect to the closest parent, or return 410.
8. Redirects are 301, single hop, no chains through an intermediate URL.
9. Old image and PDF URLs are included, because they collect links and appear in image search.
10. The map is tested on staging before launch, not written on launch night.

4. The week before launch

1. Every page has a unique title tag and meta description, written rather than auto-generated.
2. Every page has one H1 containing the term it targets.
3. Internal links point at the new URLs, not at old ones that will redirect.
4. No page you want ranked carries a noindex tag. Search the whole staging build for “noindex”.
5. robots.txt for production is written and does not contain the staging “Disallow: /”.
6. An XML sitemap is generated containing only canonical, indexable pages.
7. The SSL certificate is installed and valid, and no page loads a mixed-content resource over http.
8. 404 page exists, returns a real 404 status, and offers navigation and search.
9. Analytics, tag manager and conversion tracking are installed on the new templates and tested on staging.
10. Forms are tested end to end, including the notification email and any CRM handoff.
11. Contact details, prices, opening hours and staff names are current, not copied from the old site without checking.
12. Someone who did not build the site has proofread the copy.
13. A full crawl of staging is run and every broken link, missing title and orphan page fixed.
14. Record the baseline: current rankings for the top terms, monthly organic sessions, monthly enquiries. You cannot detect a launch problem without it.

5. Launch day

1. Launch when you can watch it, not on a Friday evening or the day before a festival.
2. Confirm robots.txt on the live domain allows crawling and that no noindex tag shipped with the build.
3. Test a sample of redirects by hand: the ten highest-traffic old URLs, an image, a PDF, and one deep page.
4. Crawl the live site immediately and check status codes, titles, canonicals and internal links.
5. Submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console, and keep the old sitemap submitted for a while so Google crawls the old URLs and sees the redirects.
6. Confirm analytics is recording, that conversions fire, and that you are not counting your own team’s visits.
7. Update the website URL on the Google Business Profile, social profiles, email signatures, ad accounts and any printed material that points at a URL you changed.
8. Check the site on an actual phone on mobile data, including the forms and the phone links.
9. Note the launch date and time in analytics as an annotation.

6. The first month

1. Check Search Console daily for the first week: crawl errors, coverage changes, and the “Page indexing” report.
2. Watch for a spike in 404s and fix the redirects they reveal. There are always some the crawl missed.
3. Expect some ranking movement for two to four weeks while Google reprocesses the site; expect recovery, not permanent loss, if the redirects are right.
4. Compare organic sessions and enquiries against the baseline weekly, by page, not just site-wide.
5. Validate structured data and fix any errors reported.
6. Re-check Core Web Vitals on field data once enough traffic has accumulated.
7. Contact the most valuable external sites still linking to old URLs and ask them to update, so the link no longer depends on a redirect.
8. If traffic drops and stays down after four weeks, treat it as a fault, not as patience: recheck indexation, redirects and canonicals first.

The three that cause most of the damage

In the recoveries I am called into, it is nearly always one of three things: the staging “Disallow: /” shipped to production, every old URL redirected to the homepage, or the redirect map built only from the new site’s sitemap so the old pages nobody remembered were dropped. All three are avoidable in an afternoon before launch, and all three take months to recover from afterwards.

If a redesign is coming, the service is website migration SEO, and the build side is website redesign. If a launch has already gone wrong, send the site through the free SEO audit and I will tell you what shipped. The technical work behind most of this list is technical SEO, tracking is covered by the GA4 and GTM setup checklist, and the ongoing version of these checks is the SEO audit checklist. Everything else is on the resources page.

Last updated 2026-09-03.

Updated September 26, 2026