What to check before launching a new business website

Bizer · 2026-10-01

The most common launch mistake is not a design problem. It is a contact form that sends every message to an inbox nobody reads, or to the web designer's test address. The business goes live, the site looks great, and for three weeks the leads quietly vanish.

Run through this list before you announce anything. Most of it takes an afternoon. Do it on your phone as well as a computer, because most local customers will see your site on a phone first.

Does every form and button actually reach you?

Test every way a customer can contact you, as a customer would:

Submit each form with a real message and confirm it arrives where you expect, including the spam folder.
Tap every phone number on a phone. It should dial, not just display.
Click every email link, booking link and "get a quote" button.
If you take payments, run one real small transaction and refund it.

If a form sends a confirmation email to the customer, read that email too. It is often the first thing you ever say to a new customer, and it usually still contains the template's placeholder text.

Can Google see the site?

New sites are often built with search engines blocked, so the half-finished version does not get indexed. Somebody has to turn that off at launch, and somebody often forgets.

On WordPress, go to Settings, then Reading, and make sure "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" is unchecked.
On other builders, look for a similar "hide from search engines" or password protection setting.
Add the site to Google Search Console and submit your sitemap. It is free and it tells you when Google finds problems.

Search Console will not make you rank. It will tell you whether Google can read your pages at all, which is the step before ranking.

Are the old addresses redirected?

If you are replacing an older site, every old page address that people or Google know about should point to its closest new page with a permanent (301) redirect. Without redirects, the links customers saved, the links other sites gave you, and the pages Google already ranked all turn into error pages on launch day.

Make a list of the old site's URLs before you take it down. Your old sitemap or Search Console's page report is a good source. This is the step most often skipped, and the one that costs the most search traffic.

Is it fast enough on a phone?

Run your home page and your main service page through PageSpeed Insights. Google's Core Web Vitals, as documented on web.dev as of 2026, treat a page as "good" when the main content appears within 2.5 seconds, the page responds to a tap within 200 milliseconds, and the layout does not jump around while loading.

The usual culprit on a small business site is images uploaded straight from a camera at full size. Resize them before upload. That one fix often does more than any plugin.

Is the basic information correct and consistent?

Read every page once, slowly, out loud if you can. Check:

Business name, address and phone number match your Google Business Profile exactly.
Hours, including how you handle holidays.
Prices, if you list them, carry a date or a "starting at".
No leftover "Lorem ipsum" text or stock template phrases.
Each page has its own title, which is what shows as the blue link in search results.

Is the site secure and legally covered?

The address starts with https and the browser shows no warnings. WordPress.org's own requirements page recommends HTTPS support for any WordPress host.
You have a privacy policy if any form collects names, emails or phone numbers.
Backups are running and you know where they are stored. If the site is on WordPress, see how to back up a WordPress website.
You, not only your designer, have the login for the domain registrar, the host and the site itself.

That last one matters more than it looks. When a designer moves on and the business does not own its own domain login, getting it back can take weeks.

Can everyone use it?

Try the site using only the keyboard: press Tab through each page and see whether you can reach every link and button. Check that images have descriptions (alt text) and that text has enough contrast against its background. The accepted technical standard is WCAG 2.2 from the W3C. You do not need to master it before launch, but these three checks catch the problems customers hit most.

What is uncertain

How strictly US accessibility law applies to a small private business website is still not settled. Courts have ruled different ways, and as of September 2026 there is no single federal rule that sets a technical standard for private businesses. We would not tell you a site is legally safe. We would tell you the keyboard and contrast checks are cheap and that customers who need them are real.

The cost of doing this properly

Expect three to five hours for a small site, more if you are moving from an old one with many pages. It is boring work. It is also cheaper than a month of lost leads, which is what a broken form costs, and you only find out about that one when a customer says they wrote to you weeks ago.