Launching a site is exciting, and that's exactly why things get rushed. Every item on the list below is something that, if skipped, can keep a site invisible in search for months or tank its rankings. I run through this list item by item before every launch.
Crawlability and indexing
-
Did the staging
noindexactually get removed? Failure scenario number one. If you forget to remove the tag you used to hide the site from search engines during development, it stays invisible after launch too. Open the source after going live and eyeball therobotsmeta tag. - Does
robots.txtexist, and is it accidentally blocking something? A singleDisallow: /line blocks the entire site. - Are CSS and JS files open to crawling? Google wants to see the page the way you see it; blocking stylesheets makes it judge the page as broken.
- Was an XML sitemap generated, and does it only include indexable pages? Putting
noindexpages in the sitemap sends a contradictory signal. - Is the sitemap declared in
robots.txtand submitted to Search Console?
Deduplication
- Is there a single preferred domain? www and non-www should redirect to one canonical version with a 301.
- Is the entire site on HTTPS, with the http version redirected?
- Does something like
/index.phpredirect to the root address? If the same page is reachable through two different URLs, ranking signal gets split between them. - Does every page have a
canonicaltag pointing to itself? A copy-paste error where every page's canonical points at the homepage is a common mistake. - Do filter and sort parameters generate infinite URLs? On a product listing, combinations like
?sort=price&color=bluecan create thousands of duplicate pages.
On-page fundamentals
- Does every page have its own unique
<title>tag? Using the same title across the entire site — yes, I've seen this in production — kills rankings on its own. - Does every page have its own unique meta description? Not a ranking factor, but it drives click-through rate.
- Does every page have exactly one
<h1>that describes the page's topic? - Is the heading hierarchy logical? Don't jump from H1 straight to H3.
- Do images have meaningful
alttext? Decorative images should use an emptyalt="".
Structured data and sharing
- Is structured data added via JSON-LD?
Personfor a personal site,Organizationfor a business,BlogPostingfor articles. See the schema markup guide for details. - Are Open Graph and Twitter Card tags in place? If a link preview on WhatsApp or LinkedIn comes back with no image, your click-through rate drops.
- Is the language declared correctly? If a page serves English content but has
<html lang="tr">, fix it. A multilingual site needs properhreflangtags.
Performance and final checks
- Do Core Web Vitals hit their thresholds? Measure on mobile — Google indexes mobile-first. Details in the performance post.
- Is the 404 page meaningful, and does it return the correct status code? A page that says "not found" but returns a 200 (a soft 404) pollutes the index.
Launch day
Finishing the list isn't the end of the job. On the day you go live, do these three things:
- Verify the property in Search Console and submit the sitemap.
- Run the URL Inspection tool on the homepage and request indexing.
- Search
site:yourdomain.comafter 3-4 days. If pages aren't showing up, go back to items 1-5 above.
This list doesn't guarantee rankings — no technical list does. What it does is more fundamental: it makes sure your site can enter the race. Content and authority are the work that comes after.