The 12-point checklist we run before every site launch

The last week before a site launch is where good builds get protected or quietly ruined. After auditing 12 client sites and seeing the same problems reappear, we turned our final week into a fixed 12-point checklist. Nothing ships until every point passes — here's the whole list.

Performance and weight (points 1–4)

• Lighthouse 95+ in all four categories on mobile, tested over throttled 4G — not on the office wifi.
• Every image served at render size, in modern formats, with explicit width and height so nothing shifts while loading.
• Total page weight under 1MB for every template, hero included. The average page on the web is heavier; that's the point.
• Zero render-blocking third-party scripts. Analytics and chat widgets load deferred or not at all.

Metadata and sharing (points 5–8)

• Unique title and meta description on every page, written by a human, at sensible lengths.
• Open Graph and Twitter cards verified by actually pasting three URLs into a real chat app and looking at the preview.
• Canonical URLs, sitemap.xml and robots.txt consistent with each other — the sitemap contains only pages we want indexed.
• Structured data validated, because a broken JSON-LD block is worse than none.

Accessibility basics (points 9–11)

• Full keyboard pass: every interactive element reachable, visible focus states, no traps.
• Contrast check on real components, not just the palette — text over photos is where contrast goes to die.
• Descriptive alt text on meaningful images, empty alt on decorative ones. A screen reader session on the homepage and one deep page.

Point 12: the final hour

The last check is manual and non-negotiable: one person who didn't build the site clicks through every page on a phone, submits every form, and reads every headline out loud. On three separate launches this caught things every automated check missed — a form that validated but sent nothing, a headline that broke into an unfortunate two-line split, and a phone number that dialed the client's old office.

If you want this level of rigor applied to your next launch, this checklist is baked into our web design and build service — and yes, you get the completed checklist as part of handoff.