Checklist before launching a corporate website

Technical SEO, forms, CMS, 404s and redirects: what must be closed on go-live day — not the week after.

Published on September 5, 20261 min read

What you’ll take away

Launch is not "upload files": SEO, forms and a real 404 must be ready.
Whoever edits content should have logged into the CMS before go-live.
One missed redirect kills traffic you already earned.

Launch day often fixates on design. What breaks the week after is rarely the button colour: it is a form that never arrives, an ugly 404, or Google indexing URLs that no longer exist.

Minimum technical SEO

Before you point the domain:

Unique titles and meta descriptions on key pages.
A coherent sitemap.xml and robots.txt (do not block what you want ranked).
Canonical tags and hreflang if you ship ES/EN.
Basic structured data (Organization, WebSite) — no fake reviews.

If you migrate from another site, 301 redirects belong in the same package as the redesign — not “we will do that later.”

Forms and contact

Send a real test into the inbox the team will use. Check spam, subject lines and the confirmation the visitor sees. A pretty form that drops leads is worse than a phone number in the footer.

CMS and training

Whoever will publish news or services must have logged into the admin and made a test edit before launch. If only the developer knows the CMS, the site freezes in month two.

404, legal and performance

A clear 404 with links home and to contact.
Privacy and cookies aligned with what you actually load.
A mobile pass with Lighthouse or WebPageTest: decent LCP on the home page (no obsession with a perfect 100).

Watch out: “we checked staging” is not the same as a pass on the live domain with real HTTPS.

How we run it at Bitora

On a custom corporate website go-live includes this checklist with a closed scope. If you do not know where to start, the free diagnostic ranks priorities with no commitment.

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