The 90-Point Checklist I Run Before Every WordPress Launch

A launch is a process, not a moment. The difference between a smooth go-live and a frantic one is almost never talent — it’s whether someone worked through a list before pointing DNS at the new site.

I run the same 90-point checklist before every WordPress launch. It’s saved me from the classic disasters more times than I can count: the contact form quietly emailing the developer instead of the client, the staging site still telling Google to stay away, the “quick” launch that took the site down for an afternoon.

Below are 20 of those checkpoints — the ones that catch the most expensive mistakes. Work through them on your next launch and you’ll already be ahead of most sites that go live.

Content & links

• Kill every bit of placeholder text. Lorem ipsum, “Company Name here”, the theme demo’s fake testimonials — search the whole site and remove all of it.
• Make phone numbers and emails clickable. Wrap them in tel: and mailto: links. On mobile especially, a tappable number is a lead; a plain string is friction.
• Click every internal link. Menus, buttons, footer, in-content links — each one should land on the right page, not a 404 or a staging URL.
• Build a branded 404 page. It will get hit. Make sure it’s on-brand and links back to your key pages so a dead end becomes a way back in.
• Set the favicon and social share image. The og:image is what appears when someone shares the site — without it your links look broken in every feed and chat app.

SEO — the checks people skip

• Untick “Discourage search engines”. This is the single most expensive checkbox in WordPress (Settings → Reading). Leave it ticked on launch day and Google won’t index a thing. I check this twice.
• Get your redirects in place before launch, not after. On a rebuild, every old URL should 301 to its closest new equivalent. Skip this and you throw away hard-won rankings overnight.
• One H1 per page, in a logical heading order. It’s a five-minute audit that helps both accessibility and search.
• Give every key page a unique title tag and meta description. Duplicated or auto-generated meta is a wasted opportunity on your most important pages.
• Resolve to one canonical version. www vs non-www, http vs https — pick one, redirect the rest, and make sure your canonical tags agree. Duplicate versions split your ranking signals.
• Generate an XML sitemap and submit it in Search Console. Then check robots.txt actually allows the pages you want crawled.

Forms & functionality

• Submit every form and confirm the email actually arrives. Test the real inbox, not just the “success” message.
• Send form notifications to the client, not the developer. This is the classic launch-day mistake — the site goes live, enquiries roll in, and they’re all landing in your inbox instead of theirs.
• Check spam protection is on. A honeypot or captcha that’s actually working, or you’ll drown in junk within a week.
• For e-commerce, place a full test order and refund it. Payment, confirmation emails, stock levels, tax — exercise the whole path before a real customer does.

Performance

• Pass Core Web Vitals on your key templates. Test the home page, a typical post and a landing page in PageSpeed Insights — on mobile, where most people actually are.
• Serve images compressed and in modern formats. WebP or AVIF, sized sensibly. Oversized images are the number-one cause of slow WordPress pages.
• Lazy-load below the fold and preload the hero. Don’t make the browser download everything at once.

Security

• Force HTTPS everywhere and fix mixed-content warnings. A valid certificate isn’t enough if half the assets still load over http.
• Configure automated off-site backups — and test a restore. A backup you’ve never restored is a hope, not a backup. This is the one that turns a bad hour into a bad month if you skip it.

That’s 20. The full checklist is 90.

These are the highest-impact checks, but they’re a fraction of what a genuinely professional launch covers. The full list also runs through accessibility (keyboard navigation, colour contrast, form labels and announced errors), legal and GDPR (privacy policy, cookie consent, non-essential scripts blocked until consent), analytics and conversion tracking, and the go-live sequence itself — lowering DNS TTL ahead of the switch, launching at a low-traffic time with a rollback plan, and re-testing forms on the live domain once you’re there.

I’ve packaged the complete 90-point checklist — formatted, editable, and ready to run on every project — into The WordPress Client Kit, alongside five other documents I use on real client work: a discovery questionnaire, a proposal template, a client handover guide, a care-plan sales sheet, and a new-client welcome pack.

It’s the entire client process, from first enquiry to recurring revenue, in six editable files you can send today.

Get The WordPress Client Kit → — £27, instant download, unlimited client projects.

Building or rebuilding a WordPress site and want it launched properly? Get in touch — I handle the whole 90 points as standard.