• Pre-Launch
  • Content and Style
    • Typography and layout
      • Check for incorrect punctuation marks, particularly apostrophes, quotation marks and hyphens/dashes
      • Check headings for where you could potentially use ligatures
      • Check for widow/orphan terms in important paragraphs
    • Spelling and grammar
    • Consistency
      • Capitalisation (especially of main headings)
      • Tense/Style of writing
      • Recurring/common phrases (e.g. ‘More about X’ links)
      • Variations in words (e.g. Websites vs Web Sites, or UK vs US spelling)
      • Treatment of bulleted lists (e.g. periods or commas at end of each item)
    • Check for hard-coded links to staging domain (i.e. ensure all links will change to ‘live’ URL/domain when site is launched)
    • Ensure no test content on site
    • Check how important pages (e.g. content items) print
    • For re-designs, ensure important old/existing URLs are redirected to relevant new URLs, if the URL scheme is changing
    • Check all ‘Hidden Copy’ (e.g. alt text, transcriptions, text in JavaScript functions)
  • Standards and Validation
    • Accessibility
    • HTML validation
    • JavaScript validation
    • CSS validation
  • Search Engine Visibility, SEO and Metrics
    • Page Titles are important; ensure they make sense and have relevant keywords in them.
    • Create metadata descriptions for important pages.
    • Check for canonical domain issues (e.g. variations in links to http://site.com http://www.site.com http://www.site.com/index.html should be reduced to a single consistent style)
    • Ensure content is marked-up semantically/correctly (h1, etc.)
    • Check for target keyword usage in general content
    • Check format (user/search engine friendliness) of URLs
    • Set up Analytics, FeedBurner, and any other packages for measuring ongoing success
    • Create an XML Sitemap
    • Configure Google Webmaster Console and Yahoo! Site Explorer
  • Functional Testing
    • Check all bespoke/complex functionality
    • Check search functionality (including relevance of results)
    • Check on common variations of browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome etc.), version (6, 7, 2.2, 3.1 etc.) and platform (Windows, OSX, Linux)
    • Check on common variations of Screen Resolution
    • Test all forms (e.g. contact us, blog comments), including anti-spam features, response emails/text, etc.
    • Test without JavaScript, Flash, and other plug-ins
    • Check all external links are valid
  • Security/Risk
    • Configure backup schedule, and test recovery from backup.
    • Protect any sensitive pages (e.g. administration area)
    • Use robots.txt where necessary
    • Security/Penetration test
    • Turn-off verbose error reporting
    • Check disk space/capacity
    • Set-up email/SMS monitoring/alerts (e.g. for errors, server warnings); consider internal and external monitoring services
  • Performance
    • Load test
    • Check image optimisation
    • Check and implement caching where necessary
    • Check total page size/download time
    • Minify/compress static (JavaScript/HTML/CSS) files
    • Optimise your CSS: use short image paths; make full-use ‘cascading’ nature of CSS, etc.
    • Check correct database indexing
    • Check configuration at every level (Web server, Database, any other software e.g. Content Management System)
    • Configure server-based logging/measurement tools (e.g. database/web server logging)
  • Finishing Touches
    • Create custom 404/error pages
    • Create a favicon
• Post-Launch
  • Marketing
    • Social Marketing: Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, Facebook, Stumbleupon, etc.
    • Submit to search engines
    • Set-up PPC/Google Adwords where necessary
    • Check formatting of site results in SERPs
  • Ongoing
    • Monitor and respond to feedback (direct feedback, on Social Media sites, check for chatter through Google, etc.)
    • Check analytics for problems, popular pages etc. and adjust as necessary
    • Update content

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Based on http://www.boxuk.com/blog/the-ultimate-website-launch-checklist

This is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/