SEO · 7 min · Updated
The technical SEO checklist for a new website launch
Launching or redesigning a website? Use this technical SEO checklist for redirects, canonicals, hreflang, sitemaps and the first two weeks after launch so you keep your rankings.
Most organic traffic lost in a redesign is lost on launch day, and almost all of it is avoidable. This is the checklist we use before, during and after every launch.
Before launch
- Crawl the current site and export every URL that receives traffic or links.
- Map each old URL to its best new equivalent. Avoid sending everything to the homepage.
- Make sure the staging site is blocked from indexing with authentication, not just a robots.txt line.
- Write unique titles and meta descriptions for every important page, in every language.
- Check that each page has one H1 and a logical heading structure.
On launch day
- Put permanent 301 redirects live at the same moment the new site goes live.
- Point canonical tags at the live domain and choose one version: https, with or without www.
- On multilingual sites, link every language version to the others with hreflang, including x-default.
- Publish an XML sitemap that lists only live, indexable pages, and reference it in robots.txt.
- Submit the sitemap in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
The first two weeks
- Watch the Pages report in Search Console daily for unexpected 404s or excluded pages.
- Test the old top URLs by hand and confirm each one redirects in a single hop.
- Check Core Web Vitals on real devices, especially mobile.
- Keep the redirects in place for at least a year, and ideally permanently.
Why it matters
Search engines treat a new URL as a new page until signals prove otherwise. Clean redirects, consistent canonicals and a fast, crawlable site pass those signals on quickly. Problems caught in week one cost hours; caught in month three, they cost rankings.
If you are planning a redesign or migration, our free website audit includes a launch-risk review.
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