Website Go-Live Checklist: What to Check on Launch Day

The move from staging to production changes the domain, the environment variables, the DNS records and often the build settings. Most go-live failures come from something that was correct on staging and was never switched. Run these checks against the live domain, not the staging copy, in this order: the first group can make your site invisible, so it comes first.

Check that search engines can see the site

1. Remove noindex. Look for <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> in the page source and an X-Robots-Tag: noindex response header. Staging setups often set the header at the host level, so the page source can look clean while the header still blocks indexing.
2. Check robots.txt. Open /robots.txt and confirm it does not contain Disallow: / for all crawlers, and that it points to your sitemap.
3. Confirm the sitemap loads. /sitemap.xml should return 200 and list live URLs on your production domain, not staging hostnames. Then submit it in Search Console.

Check the domain and connection

4. Redirect HTTP to HTTPS. Visit http://yourdomain and confirm it lands on the HTTPS version in one redirect.
5. Pick one hostname. Decide between www and the bare domain, and redirect the other to it with a permanent redirect, so search engines see one site instead of two.
6. Look for mixed content. Open the browser console on your main pages. An image or script still loaded overhttp:// triggers warnings and can be blocked.
7. Test a made-up URL. It should return a real 404 status with a helpful page. A 200 on a missing page makes search engines treat junk URLs as content.

Check what visitors touch

8. Submit every form once. Use a real address and confirm the message arrives. Email delivery settings differ between staging and production.
9. Click the main paths. Home to signup, home to pricing, and every link in the footer. Broken links on launch day are the easiest problem for a visitor to notice.
10. Confirm analytics and consent. Load the site in a private window, accept the cookie banner, and check that a pageview event is recorded against the production property.

Run the full pass

These ten checks cover the failure modes that hurt most on day one. Each maps to a check in the technical launch checklist and the SEO launch checklist. For the wider list, including copy, conversion and accessibility, see common launch mistakes or the full website launch checklist. To run all of it against your live domain in about two minutes, use the website audit.