About Website Checklist

Website Checklist is a free, independent reference for the practical work of launching and maintaining a website—covering pre-launch, SEO, performance, accessibility, security and everything in between. It exists because good launches usually come down to not missing the boring, unglamorous details.

Who this is for

• Freelancers and independent developers who want a repeatable launch process
• Small-business owners managing their own website without a dedicated technical team
• Agencies looking for a shared checklist to standardize launches across clients
• Anyone maintaining an existing site who wants a structured way to audit it
• Teams planning a migration, redesign or replatform who need to know what's genuinely at risk
• Anyone brought in partway through a project—a new hire, a contractor picking up someone else's site—who needs a fast, reliable way to see what's actually been done and what hasn't

The checklists are deliberately organized by concern rather than by role, since the same page often gets used by a developer checking technical details and a business owner sanity-checking the result—both should be able to follow it.

Our approach

• Platform-neutral: the advice applies whether you're hand-coding a site or using any content-management platform—we don't assume or push a specific product. Where something is genuinely platform-specific, like the WordPress checklist, it's called out separately rather than mixed into the general advice;
• No invented numbers: we don't cite specific statistics we can't stand behind. Where a claim would need a source we don't have, we describe the general, well-established principle instead;
• Generic over branded: where a category of tool is genuinely useful (a site crawler, an accessibility checker, a speed-testing tool), we describe the category rather than push a specific paid product; well-known free tools are named only when we're confident they're real, current and genuinely useful;
• Evergreen, not trend-chasing: the fundamentals here—semantic HTML, real HTTPS, genuine accessibility, honest content—don't go out of date the way specific tool recommendations do.

What this site is not

• Not legal, tax or accessibility-compliance advice—requirements vary by jurisdiction and business type, so confirm specifics with a qualified professional;
• Not affiliated with any hosting provider, CMS, plugin, theme or SEO tool mentioned or implied anywhere on the site;
• Not a guarantee of search rankings—no checklist can promise that, and anyone who claims otherwise is selling something.

Corrections

Best practices evolve—particularly around performance metrics, accessibility standards, privacy regulation and search-engine guidance. If something here goes stale, it should be updated rather than left to quietly mislead people; that's the whole point of an evergreen reference.

Start with the pre-launch checklist, or see the FAQ for quick answers.