Pilots don’t take off without running through a checklist. Not because they’ve forgotten how to fly a plane, but because a printed list catches the one small thing a tired, confident brain skips. Hospitals adopted the same idea for surgery and cut complications dramatically. It turns out “I’ve done this a hundred times” is exactly when things get missed: not despite the experience, but because of it.
I’ve launched a lot of WordPress sites. And I’ve still shipped a site without a favicon, forgotten to turn off “discourage search engines” after launch, and once left a staging password screen up for three days after go-live. None of those were hard to prevent. They just weren’t on a list in front of me.
So here’s the list. Whether you’re launching a brand-new site, moving to a new host, or just doing a big redesign, run through this before you tell anyone the new site is live.
1. Hosting is actually ready
Not just “the account exists”: the site is actually deployed there, DNS is pointed at it, and you’ve loaded the real site (not a placeholder) to confirm it works end to end.
2. Your domain won’t expire without you noticing
Auto-renew should be on, and the card on file should be current. A shocking number of small business sites go down not from a hack, but because a domain quietly expired and nobody got the renewal email in time.
3. SSL is on and working everywhere
The little padlock isn’t optional anymore: browsers actively warn visitors away from sites without it, and it affects how you rank in search. Check every page, not just the homepage; it’s common for one subpage to still load over plain http and trigger a “not secure” warning.
4. You can actually see your traffic
Get analytics installed and verified before launch, not after. Otherwise you lose the “before” data point entirely and can never answer “did the new site help?”
5. A real backup exists
Not “the host probably backs things up somewhere.” An actual, restorable backup, taken after launch, that you (or whoever maintains the site) could use to undo a bad update or recover from a hack. If you’ve never test-restored a backup, you don’t actually know if it works.
6. The favicon is there
Small, easy to forget, and the first thing people notice missing: that generic gray globe in a browser tab makes a brand-new site look unfinished. Takes five minutes to fix, and it’s the kind of detail that quietly signals whether anyone is paying attention to the site at all.
The real point of a checklist
None of these six items are hard. That’s exactly why they get skipped: nobody sits down and plans to forget the SSL check, it just doesn’t cross their mind on launch day when there are twelve other things on fire. A list doesn’t rely on remembering. It just has to be run.
This is also, not coincidentally, close to the same list I run through on every monthly checkup for the sites I maintain, because “launched correctly” doesn’t mean “stays correct.” Domains still expire, SSL certificates still lapse, and backups still silently stop running, months after everyone stopped thinking about launch day.