A website launch checklist covers the gap between "we have a website" and "Google and AI can find, understand, and recommend it." Ours runs 27 steps across eight phases, and the order is the point: the first two checks decide whether anything else on the list matters, and the measurement phase has to happen at launch because you can't backfill the data later.
Most items take minutes. The whole list takes an afternoon. And it's for two kinds of sites: brand-new ones, and the ones launched years ago that nobody has managed since.
Step 0: make sure Google is allowed in
The most expensive launch mistake is invisible, and it's a meta tag.
Staging sites get set to noindex so the half-built version doesn't leak into search results. Then launch day comes, everyone checks that the site looks right, and nobody flips the switch. The site works perfectly for every human who visits it. Google is blocked from all of it.
Two checks, thirty seconds each:
1. View your homepage source. Search for "noindex."
If it's there, Google can't index your site.
2. Visit yoursite.com/robots.txt.
If you see "Disallow: /", Google can't crawl your site.
Everything below is wasted effort until both pass. We've seen sites run paid ads to a noindexed domain for months, wondering why the organic needle never moved.
The pages your site needs
A page can only rank for what it's about. That single idea generates most of this phase.
One page per service you sell, not one "Services" page listing everything: a page about everything is about nothing. Your city in the title, H1, and opening paragraph of each service page, because "plumber" is a national fight you'll lose and "plumber in Jacksonville Beach" is winnable. A location page per service area if you serve several, each with real local detail rather than the same page with the city name swapped.
Then the pages that prove you're real. An about page with actual people and a history, because Google and AI systems both use it to decide you're a legitimate business. A contact page whose name, address, and phone match your Google Business Profile exactly. An FAQ section answering the questions customers ask on the phone, in their words. And privacy and terms pages, which are legally required the moment you collect an email address, and whose absence reads as a trust problem.
One update worth knowing on the FAQ item: FAQ markup no longer earns the expandable rich results it used to (Google limited them in 2023 and removed them fully in May 2026). FAQ content still ranks and still gets quoted in AI answers. Write it for readers, not for markup.
On-page basics: the five-placement check
For each important page, your target phrase should appear in five places:
1. The page title (near the front, under ~60 characters)
2. The meta description (under ~155 characters)
3. The URL slug
4. The H1
5. The first sentence
That's the whole relevance formula, free. It's also the fastest audit you can run on an existing site: pick your most important page and count how many of the five it hits. Most sites we assess score two.
Round out the phase with one clear H1 per page, a unique meta description on every page (duplicates tell Google your pages are interchangeable), one primary call to action visible without scrolling, internal links with descriptive anchor text instead of "click here," and alt text on every image. None of this is advanced. All of it gets skipped.
Trust: reviews you didn't buy
Pull your real Google reviews onto the site. If you're brand new and have zero, the answer is not to fake it, buy them, or recruit your cousin: purchased reviews eventually cost you the profile that displays them. Ask every real customer, starting with your first. Three real reviews beat thirty purchased ones.
Then make your trust signals specific and verifiable. "FL License #CFC1234567" persuades; a row of decorative badges doesn't. Licenses, insurance, years in business, associations: name them exactly or leave them off.
Technical checks, then measurement, in that order
The technical phase is three items. Open the site on your actual phone and use it: tap every button, submit the contact form, read a service page, because most of your visitors will only ever see this version. Compress your images before uploading (photos straight off a phone are 10x larger than needed, and they're the top reason small-business sites load slowly; TinyPNG and Squoosh are free). Confirm your platform generated an XML sitemap at yoursite.com/sitemap.xml.
Then measurement, and this belongs at launch, not later. Set up Google Search Console: it's free, takes ten minutes, and it's the only place Google tells you directly which searches show your site. Submit your sitemap inside it. Set up Google Analytics 4 the same day, because analytics data starts when you install it and never before; a site that waits six months to add GA4 has six months of darkness it can never light. (If your business doesn't run on Gmail, Search Console works without one.)
For local businesses, one more free listing outranks most of this list in impact: create or claim your Google Business Profile, match it exactly to your contact page, pick accurate categories, and add real photos. For many service businesses it drives more calls than the website itself.
The two habits that never come off the list
Backlinks, earned slowly. Local associations, suppliers, chambers of commerce, guest contributions, real press. One or two genuine links a month compounds; a burst of junk links doesn't, and can hurt.
And calibrated patience. New domains sit in a trust-building period measured in months. Flat traffic through month three is the system working normally, not evidence the work failed. The sites that win keep publishing well-organized pages during the quiet stretch, because that's the content that ignites when trust arrives. Our first 90 days plan covers exactly what to publish while you wait.
Who shouldn't use this checklist
If your site already has Search Console history, ranked pages, and a steady review pipeline, you've outgrown this list. Your problems live further up the stack: content gaps, striking distance keywords, AI visibility. Start with the AI SEO checklist instead, or run an AI visibility audit to see where you stand across Google and the AI assistants.
For everyone else: we've packaged the full 27-point list as a free Website Launch Checklist kit, including a plain-text version you can paste straight into your project tracker. It unlocks with an email, and the whole method is right here on this page regardless.
Launch it, run the list, then check Search Console monthly: which queries show your pages, which pages earn impressions but no clicks, what's climbing. That monthly loop is where rankings get made, and it's the first thing we build into the Assay phase of the Reforge Method when clients hand us a freshly launched site.