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Thursday, April 16, 2026

Process5 min read

The one-page pre-ship checklist I run before every launch

The exact checklist I run in the last thirty minutes before a site goes live. It has never failed to catch at least one real issue.

ByEbubeker RexhaProcessChecklistLaunching

Every site I ship ends the same way. Thirty minutes before it goes live, I close every tab that is not the preview, pour a glass of water, and run the same checklist from top to bottom. The checklist has grown over the years, and every item on it earned its place by being the thing I forgot on some other day.

Here is the current version, unedited, exactly as I run it. If you ship a site without going through something like this, you are going to have a bad first hour of uptime.

Content

  • Every heading reads as a standalone sentence
  • No placeholder lorem ipsum anywhere, including alt text
  • Business name, address, and hours match the real ones
  • Every phone number is a real, clickable tel: link
  • Every email address is a real, clickable mailto: link
  • Every external link opens correctly and has the right target

SEO and metadata

  • Title tag is unique and under sixty characters
  • Meta description is unique and under one hundred and sixty characters
  • Canonical URL points at the live domain, not the preview
  • Open Graph image exists and is 1200 by 630
  • Favicon exists in every size the platform expects
  • Sitemap is generated and reachable at /sitemap.xml
  • Robots file is present and not accidentally blocking the site
  • Structured data validates with no errors

Forms and email

  • Contact form sends a test submission end to end
  • The test submission lands in the correct inbox
  • The form shows a real success state, not just a redirect
  • The form shows a real error state if something fails
  • Spam protection is on (honeypot or similar)

Performance and accessibility

  • Lighthouse score is above ninety on the key pages
  • Largest contentful paint image is preloaded
  • Every image has an alt attribute
  • Color contrast on text and CTAs passes WCAG AA
  • The site is usable by keyboard alone

Mobile

  • The hero fits a 375 pixel wide viewport without awkward wrapping
  • The primary CTA is reachable with one thumb
  • The navigation works on a small screen
  • Tap targets are at least 44 pixels tall

Analytics and tracking

  • Analytics is installed and firing on the live domain
  • No test events are polluting production counts
  • Any conversion events you care about actually fire

DNS and hosting

  • The apex domain and the www subdomain both resolve
  • SSL is valid and not expiring in the next month
  • The old host has been pointed at the new one, if there was one
  • Redirects from old URLs to new ones are in place

One final pass

Close the laptop. Open the site on your phone, over cellular, not wifi. Read the hero. Tap the CTA. Submit the form. If any of those feel wrong, you have time to fix them right now. If all three feel right, ship it.

Every item on this list got here because I forgot it on some other day. Nobody ships a clean launch on memory.

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