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

Updated · Check Before Publish

Before you launch a page, verify two kinds of thing: what a browser won't show you (whether search engines may index it, what its link preview looks like, broken files, insecure resources) and what no tool can judge for you (the words, the prices, the forms, the legal pages). Every item below says how to verify it. Items marked Checker are confirmed in one run of the free Website Pre-Publish Checker; items marked You need a person.

Opens the Website Pre-Publish Checker and runs it. Free, no account. The address is not stored and never goes into the URL bar.

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, of a length that won't be cut short. Treat length as guidance: search engines may rewrite either.
  • Checker Exactly one H1.
  • 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 shows the large card.
  • You Share the link once privately in the apps you care about. Each app renders and caches previews in its own way.

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 Eligibility for rich results in Google is decided by Google: its Rich Results Test is the place to check it.

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 measures speed).
  • 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, 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.

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