Website Go Live Checklist

When you're about to go live with a website, there are a number of things you need to check to make sure that the website is ready for the public. This checklist will help you to make sure that you've covered all the bases before you launch your website. If you are building a SaaS product specifically, the SaaS PRD Framework covers the planning phase: authentication, billing, email flows, legal pages, and more — everything to document before you start building.

Table of Contents

• Website Go Live Checklist
  • Table of Contents
  • SEO
  • Testing
  • Performance
  • Accessibility
  • Security
  • Error Handling
  • Analytics
  • Backups
  • URL Management

SEO

• SEO meta data
  • Title
  • Description
  • Keywords
  • Open Graph (see Dynamic OG Images in Next.js for per-page image generation)
  • Twitter Card
  • Schema.org
• Create RSS Feed
• Create robots.txt
• XML Sitemap
• Verify external and internal links
• Review HTML headers on page
• Add alt text to images

Testing

• Write tests for all pages
• Review page responsive
• Test website on different browsers

Performance

• Check performance
  • https://web.dev/explore/learn-core-web-vitals
  • https://web.dev/explore/metrics
  • https://web.dev/explore/fast
  • https://web.dev/explore/reliable
  • Check HTTP cache
  • Lighthouse score needs to be 100
• Check core web vitals

Accessibility

• Ensure website is accessible (e.g., WCAG compliance)
  • https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/
  • https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/checklist/

Security

• Redirect www/non-www & http/https versions
• Create SSL certificate
• Set up security monitoring

Error Handling

• Build the 404 page
• Build the 500 page
• Set up error tracking, monitoring and logging

Analytics

• Set up analytics

Backups

• Set up backups

URL Management

• Ensure old URLs redirect to new URLs