Your first website checklist: domain, hosting, SSL, analytics, backup

Launching a website is a dozen small jobs, and forgetting one of them is how a site goes live broken. This checklist covers launch day and the week after, in the order that causes the fewest surprises. Tick each item off as you finish it; do not skip ahead to telling people about the site until the "before you announce" section is done.

Before you buy anything

• ☐ Purpose, in one sentence. Write down what the site is for and who it is for. Every later decision gets easier when this sentence exists.
• ☐ Name picked and checked. Short, sayable, no hyphens or numbers if possible. Trademark and search checks done. (Full guide: How to pick a domain name.)
• ☐ Renewal price found. You know what the domain costs in year two, not just year one.
• ☐ Hosting decided. Static or traditional, chosen for what the site actually does — not for what an ad promised. (Guides: Shared hosting vs website builders, Netlify vs traditional hosting.)

Domain and hosting

• ☐ Domain registered at a registrar you control, with privacy protection enabled if it is not included.
• ☐ Hosting set up and the site's files uploaded, or the platform installed.
• ☐ Domain connected to hosting — DNS records set as the host instructs, and given time to spread (minutes to hours).
• ☐ Site opens at your domain, not just at the host's temporary address.

Security and the basics

• ☐ HTTPS active. The padlock shows in the browser on every page, not just the homepage. If it does not, fix it before announcing anything — visitors and search engines both treat a missing padlock as a warning.
• ☐ No placeholder text left. No "coming soon", no sample posts, no demo content. Every public page is a page you meant to publish.
• ☐ Contact route exists. At minimum, a working way for a visitor to reach you — a form that has been tested, or an address you actually read. Test it yourself before launch: send a message and confirm it arrives.
• ☐ Legal pages published. Privacy Policy, Terms of Use, and — if any link on the site is a partner link — an Affiliate Disclosure. These are not optional decoration; some programs require them before approval.

Content and structure

• ☐ Homepage says what the site does in the first screen, without scrolling.
• ☐ Navigation works on a phone. Every section reachable, every link going somewhere real, no dead ends.
• ☐ Images have descriptions. Every image carries a short text alternative, so the page still makes sense if the image fails to load and so it is usable with assistive tools.
• ☐ Titles make sense alone. Each page's title describes that page. "Home" is not a title; neither is "Page 1".

Analytics and search

• ☐ Analytics installed — one property for this domain only, and confirmed working by visiting the site and seeing your own visit register.
• ☐ Search Console verified for the domain (DNS record or file upload, whichever your setup supports).
• ☐ Sitemap submitted in Search Console after the first deploy.
• ☐ Robots file present if your setup uses one, allowing search engines to crawl the pages you want found.

Backup (do this on day one, not "later")

• ☐ A copy of the site's files exists somewhere besides the host — cloud storage or an external drive. If the host has a problem, these files are what rebuild the site.
• ☐ You know how to restore. A backup you have never tested is a hope, not a backup. Restoring to a test location once, even roughly, is worth the hour.

The phone test (do this last, on a real phone)

• ☐ Every page checked on a phone. Layout fits, no sideways scrolling, buttons tappable, images loading, navigation usable with one thumb.
• ☐ Loading is reasonable. If a page feels slow on a normal connection, shrink the images before anything else — they are almost always the cause.

Before you announce

• ☐ Someone else opens the site. A second pair of eyes finds the broken link and the typo you stopped seeing. Ask one person to click through it.
• ☐ All social and profile links point to the live domain, not to a draft, a preview, or a previous address.
• ☐ First update planned. A site that never changes looks abandoned. Decide now what the next page or update will be, and when it goes out.

The week after launch

• ☐ Analytics checked once. Which pages got visited, where visitors came from, what was ignored. One check, not daily watching.
• ☐ Search Console checked once. Any crawl errors fixed, sitemap confirmed read.
• ☐ One fix shipped. Whatever the checks turned up — a slow image, a confusing page, a missing link — fixed and re-checked on the phone.
• ☐ Next piece of content published. Launch is the start of the routine, not the end of the work.

The bottom line

Domain, hosting, HTTPS, legal pages, analytics, backup, phone test — in that order, and nothing announced until the list is ticked. A launch done this way is boring, and boring is exactly what a first launch should be: no surprises, no broken pages, and a routine you can repeat for the next update.