The 10 Checks We Run Before Any Website Goes Live.
A launch or redesign is where local businesses in York PA, Maryland and DC win big — or quietly lose the rankings and leads they already had. Below is the exact pre-launch checklist Get Us Listed runs on client builds, published in full. Use it on your own launch, or hand it to your developer and ask them to initial every line. No email required, nothing gated.
The Checklist: Initial
Every Line Before You Flip the Switch.
The first five protect what you already have — rankings, links, tracking. The last five make sure the new site actually produces more calls than the old one. Skip nothing; the expensive mistakes on this list are all invisible on launch day.
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Map every old URL to its new home (301 redirects)
The #1 redesign killer: pages move, old URLs die, and every ranking and backlink attached to them dies too. Export a full list of the old site's URLs before touching anything, then 301-redirect each one to its closest new equivalent — not everything to the homepage.
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Carry over titles, descriptions and heading structure
If a page already ranks, its title tag and H1 are part of why. Bring them to the new build deliberately — improve, don't discard. A redesign that rewrites every title from scratch is gambling with every ranking the old site earned.
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Test mobile speed on a real phone, on cell data
Your office Wi-Fi lies to you. Load the new site on a phone over LTE and watch what a real visitor sees. Then run PageSpeed Insights: if the mobile score is deep in the red before launch, it will not get better after launch — fix the heavy images and render-blocking scripts now.
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Keep analytics and tracking alive through the switch
Confirm your analytics property, conversion events and any ad tracking survive the migration — same property, not a fresh one, or you lose your history. Verify a form submission and a phone click both register as events before go-live, not after.
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Un-block search engines the moment you launch
Staging sites are (rightly) hidden from Google with a noindex flag or robots block. The single most brutal launch mistake is shipping that flag to production. Check for it the hour you launch, then resubmit your sitemap in Search Console.
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Put a tap-to-call phone number on every page
Most local visits happen on phones, and a visitor who has to hunt for your number is a visitor who calls the next result. Header, footer, and a click-to-call button in the hero — the number should never be more than one thumb-tap away.
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Give every service its own page
One "Services" page can't rank for ten different searches — ten focused pages can. If the new site collapses your services into a single page, you're launching with a smaller net than your competitors fish with.
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Test every form — and route it somewhere watched
Submit every form on the site and confirm a human gets the message. Check the spam folder, check the notification address is current, and make sure submissions are stored somewhere as a backup so a mail hiccup can't silently eat a week of leads.
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Point your Google Business Profile at the right pages
Update the profile's website link, appointment link and service links to the new URLs on launch day. A profile pointing at redirected (or dead) URLs leaks both trust and click-through — and it's the easiest fix on this list to forget.
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Recheck everything at 30 days
A month in, compare Search Console impressions and page-level rankings to the pre-launch baseline, click through your redirect list, and re-test the forms. Redesign damage usually shows up on this 30-day check — while it's still small enough to fix cheaply.
Launching Isn't the Hard Part. Launching Without Losing Ground Is.
Every item above is checkable by a careful owner or any competent developer — that’s why we publish it. The part that’s genuinely hard to DIY is knowing what the old site was worth before you replace it: which pages carry rankings, which URLs carry links, and whether the new build’s speed and structure will hold that ground or surrender it. That’s what our free written audit establishes — a 12-point baseline of your current visibility, in writing, before you flip the switch. If you’re planning a redesign, get the audit first; it turns this checklist from a generic list into a map of what your specific site can’t afford to lose.
- Free 12-point written baseline of your current visibility
- The pages and signals your redesign can't afford to break
- Speed and Core Web Vitals graded before AND after you launch
- 48-hour turnaround, no sales call required
Questions Website Owners Ask
Before Flipping the Switch.
Not at all — items 1-5 matter most in the window right before launch, and item 10 happens after. If the redirect map (item 1) hasn’t been started, make it this week’s priority; it’s the one item that gets dramatically more expensive to fix after go-live. A free written visibility audit beforehand gives you the baseline to compare against at the 30-day check.
Ask for the redirect map as a spreadsheet — old URL, new URL, one row each — and spot-check ten of them in your browser after launch, including a few deep pages (a blog post, a specific service page). If the answer to “can I see the list?” is vague, treat item 1 as not done.
As a working rule: the main content should be visible in well under three seconds on a phone over cell data, and the page shouldn’t shift around as it loads. PageSpeed Insights grades both for free. Most local sites we test fail on oversized images alone — which is also the cheapest thing to fix.
Structure is much cheaper to get right during the build than to retrofit after. Per-service pages (item 7), heading structure (item 2), and speed budgets (item 3) are architectural decisions. The polish — content expansion, reviews, citations — genuinely can come after. If your build collapses everything into five pretty pages, pause before launching.
Items 3, 6, 7 and 8 apply to any live site today, and they’re the four that most directly produce calls. Run those this week. If they surface deeper problems, our free self-check tools will tell you in about a minute whether the issue is the site, your Google profile, or both. For an already-live site, the free 28-day visibility sprint covers those four items in week two, one day at a time.
A launch handled end to end is quoted in writing after the free audit, because the cost depends on scope — that’s firm policy, because quoting before understanding your situation produces bad numbers in both directions. What we can promise up front: you own the site and every account outright, and there are no long-term contracts on starter engagements.
Know What You Have
Before You Replace It.
Send your business name and current website. We'll return a written 12-point baseline — the rankings, pages and signals your launch needs to protect — in plain English, within 48 hours. Free, and yours to keep whoever builds the site.