The complete website checklist
Whether you're launching your first site or your fiftieth, it's easy to miss something—a missing meta description, a robots.txt still set to Disallow: /, an SSL certificate nobody renewed. This is a practical, evergreen reference: twenty-five focused checklists covering everything from pre-launch content to post-launch maintenance, migrations, WordPress-specific gotchas, email deliverability and multilingual SEO—written for freelancers, agencies and small-business owners who want a working site, not a science project.
Before you launch
Pre-launch checklist
Content, design and technical basics to confirm before you go live.
Content checklist
Planning, writing and structuring content that actually serves readers.
On-page SEO checklist
Titles, meta descriptions, headings, images and internal links.
Technical SEO checklist
Crawlability, indexing, structured data and site architecture.
Search visibility & specialized SEO
Structured data & schema checklist
Choosing schema types, writing valid JSON-LD, and testing rich results.
Local SEO checklist
Google Business Profile, NAP consistency, citations and reviews.
International & multilingual SEO
hreflang, language targeting, translation quality and localized content.
E-commerce checklist
Product pages, checkout trust signals, and store-specific SEO.
Speed, images & accessibility
Performance & Core Web Vitals
Speed, LCP, INP, CLS, and how to measure them.
Image optimization checklist
Formats, compression, responsive images and lazy loading, done right.
Mobile & responsive checklist
Responsive design, viewport, touch targets and mobile testing.
Accessibility checklist
Semantic HTML, contrast, keyboard access and screen readers.
Security, privacy & email
Security checklist
HTTPS, headers, backups, updates and login protection.
Privacy & cookie consent checklist
GDPR/CCPA basics, cookie banners and privacy-by-design.
Email deliverability checklist
SPF, DKIM, DMARC and keeping transactional email out of spam.
QA & cross-browser testing checklist
A structured pass across browsers, devices and edge cases.
Go live and convert
Launch day checklist
The final run-through, step by step, for go-live day.
Analytics & tracking setup
Search Console, analytics, tag management and privacy.
Conversion & forms checklist
Lead-capture forms, friction, trust signals and UX basics.
Post-launch maintenance
The ongoing routine that keeps a site healthy after launch.
Special projects & reference
Site migration & redesign checklist
Replatforming or redesigning without losing rankings or traffic.
WordPress checklist
The platform-specific gotchas: updates, plugins, performance and security.
Common mistakes
The pitfalls that quietly sink otherwise-good launches.
FAQ
Quick answers to the questions we hear most.
About this site
What this resource is, and the standards behind it.
How to use this site
Each checklist is grouped into short, focused sections so you can jump straight to what you need—copy the relevant section into your own project-management tool, or just work top to bottom. None of it assumes a specific CMS, host or page builder; the principles apply whether you're hand-coding HTML or running the most popular website platform on the market. Where something is genuinely platform-specific—like the WordPress checklist—it's called out separately rather than mixed into the general advice.
Start with the pre-launch checklist if you're planning a new site, the migration checklist if you're replatforming or redesigning an existing one, or jump to common mistakes if you want the fast version of what tends to go wrong.