Check your site before announcing it

Before announcing your new website, open its public address on your phone. Start from the homepage and try the action a customer needs most: find a service, check whether it fits, then reach the right person or booking page. Keep a note of the address you opened and anything that prevents you from finishing.

Agree with your maintainer who can approve the launch and who will respond if a check fails. Have the person responsible for customer inquiries available for the final check so you can confirm what reaches the business.

Prepare a short acceptance record

List the customer tasks that the release must support. Make each one specific enough to repeat. “Find the opening time for Saturday” is easier to check than “review the contact page.” Beside each task, leave space for the expected result, actual result, device, date and person checking it.

Ask the content owner to confirm the service descriptions, prices or estimate wording, contact details and opening hours that appear on the new pages. Record unresolved questions before launch approval. If a page contains a temporary image or placeholder, assign someone to replace it and check the public version afterward.

Choose which problems must be fixed before you announce the site. If an inquiry reaches the wrong recipient, keep that task open, assign the routing repair and confirm receipt after retesting.

Follow the public journey through to its destination

Use the published address rather than a preview link. Open the menu, choose the relevant service and follow its next step. Check that the destination belongs to the intended business and that its wording matches what the link promised.

Coordinate any submission with the business first. Use agreed test details and a recognizable test label; arrange cleanup of any appointment, payment or record the test creates. Ask the recipient to confirm receipt and check the response shown to the visitor. A confirmation on the page and receipt by the business are separate results to record.

Repeat the important paths on a computer as well as a phone. Look at the content around each control: labels, contact details, prices and instructions should remain readable without covering the action you need. Test downloads and links that take visitors to another service, then check that there is a usable way back.

Our LiveWell Clinic case study records inconsistent appointment-button destinations in the design preview and the later move to the clinic's hosted scheduling destination. That documented preview issue is a reason to include destination checks in a release review; the case study does not measure booking increases.

Include accessibility and search handover checks

Ask your maintainer what accessibility review was completed and which issues remain. W3C's Easy Checks provides an initial review covering areas such as page titles, headings, keyboard access and form labels. W3C cautions that passing those checks can still leave significant barriers, so record the scope of the assessment you actually commissioned.

For search handover, ask the maintainer to confirm that the intended public pages are available for indexing and that any planned changes to old addresses have been checked. Keep the relevant account owner and follow-up action in the release record.

Google's recrawl guidance says crawling can take a few days to a few weeks and recommends monitoring progress in Search Console. If indexing work remains outstanding, give it an owner and a review date rather than recording the site as already appearing in search.

Close the release with evidence

After any corrections are deployed, repeat the affected task from the public address. Save the final result with the page link and a screenshot when it helps explain what was checked. Leave a failed item open until someone has verified the repair.

Keep one release note containing the publication date, completed checks, remaining issues and support contact. Share it with the people who maintain the site and answer customer inquiries. That record gives the next person a place to start when something changes after launch.