Website launch checklist: what to verify on each page, and how

Updated October 13, 2026 · Check Before Publish

Before launching a page, check what a browser won't show you (search engine indexing, link preview, broken files, insecure resources) and what no tool can judge (the words, prices, forms, legal pages). Items marked Checker are confirmed in one run of the free Website Pre-Publish Checker; items marked You need a person.

It checks one page at a time. For a whole site, run it on your most important pages: the home page, the main landing pages and anything you're about to promote.

1. Search engines can find and index it

• Checker The page answers 200, with no redirect chain.
• Checker No noindex in the robots meta tag or the X-Robots-Tag header. Staging sites often carry one. How to remove it
• Checker robots.txt lets Googlebot crawl the URL. How to find a blocking rule
• Checker The canonical points to this page, and that URL loads. When a canonical goes wrong
• Checker One title and one meta description, short enough to read in full. Google sets no length limit but cuts both to fit the device width, and it may rewrite either.
• Checker One H1 that describes the page. A single H1 is the usual convention; Google doesn't require a set number of headings.
• Checker The page is in your sitemap: run the Sitemap Checker, a separate site-level check.

2. The link preview looks right

• Checker og:title, og:description and og:image are set, the image URL is absolute and loads, and the image is a sensible size (1200 × 630 pixels is a common target). If the image doesn't show
• Checker twitter:card is set, so X knows which card to show.
• You Share the link once privately in the apps you care about. Apps fetch and cache previews separately, so a changed image may not update right away (Facebook, for example, caches images by URL).

3. Nothing on the page is broken

• Checker Links, images, scripts and stylesheets load (no 404s or server errors). Up to 100 per check, your own files first.
• Checker No http:// files on an https page. Why they break things
• Checker HTTPS, and no redirect from https back to http.
• You Click through anything loaded by JavaScript: our checkers read the HTML, not what scripts add later.

4. The basics of accessibility

• Checker Every meaningful image has alt text; decorative images have alt=""; linked images have a text alternative.
• Checker The page declares its language and a mobile viewport.
• You Keyboard navigation, colour contrast and form labels. These need a person or a dedicated accessibility tool.

5. Structured data, if you use it

• Checker JSON-LD parses, and dates, prices and currencies are in valid formats.
• You Google decides whether to show a rich result, and passing its Rich Results Test is not a guarantee of one. The test is the place to check your markup.

6. Things only you can check

• You Spelling, names, prices, dates and times.
• You Forms submit, and the message actually arrives where it should.
• You The page looks right on a phone, and loads quickly enough (Google's PageSpeed Insights reports page performance).
• You Analytics and consent work as intended.
• You Privacy policy, terms and any legally required pages are linked.
• You If you are relaunching: old URLs redirect permanently (301) to their new equivalents, and nothing important now returns a 404.
• You Fonts and images you use are licensed for this use. Font License Checker and CC License Compatibility Checker help with the reading.

After launch

Submit the sitemap in Google Search Console (a hint to Google, not a guarantee it will be crawled), inspect your most important URLs with URL Inspection, and run the check again after any change to templates, SEO plugins or hosting settings. Those are the changes that quietly bring back a noindex or a broken canonical. If a page still doesn't appear after a while, work through why a page isn't showing up on Google.