SEO
A practical technical SEO checklist for a new website launch
Launching a new site? Work through these technical checks before and after go-live to protect your search visibility.
By Zafirox Tech Team · · 1 min read
A site relaunch is one of the riskiest moments for search visibility. Pages move, URLs change and small technical mistakes can hide a whole site from Google. This checklist covers the essentials.
Before launch
- Crawl the old site and list every URL that receives traffic or links.
- Map each old URL to its closest new equivalent and prepare 301 redirects.
- Make sure the staging site is blocked from search engines, and remember to unblock the live site.
- Check every page has a unique title, meta description and a single H1.
- Test on mobile and check Core Web Vitals on key templates.
At launch
- Remove any noindex tags and robots.txt blocks inherited from staging.
- Submit the XML sitemap in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Check canonical tags point to the live URLs.
- Test redirects with a sample of old URLs, including those with trailing slashes and parameters.
After launch
- Monitor crawl errors and indexing reports daily for the first fortnight.
- Watch organic traffic and rankings for key pages against your baseline.
- Fix broken internal links and redirect chains as they appear.
- Review structured data for errors.
A note on expectations
Even a careful migration can cause short-term fluctuations while search engines reprocess your site. Good preparation reduces the risk but cannot remove it.