Small business
What to do after your website goes live: a first-week checklist
Publishing the website is the start of operations, not the end of the project. The first week should confirm that visitors can reach the site, leads arrive, data is backed up, and the owner can recover every important account.
Test the conversion path from outside your network
Use a phone and another connection to test the homepage, contact form, checkout or booking flow. Verify the notification actually reaches the business.
Confirm HTTPS and canonical domain behaviour
Check that the intended domain loads over HTTPS and that alternate hostnames redirect consistently. Avoid leaving multiple versions of the same site accessible without a plan.
Verify measurement and search discovery
Confirm analytics if you use it, add the site to Search Console, submit or verify the sitemap, and watch for crawl or indexing issues. Search visibility develops over time, so establish the measurement baseline early.
Schedule routine maintenance before failure
Review backups, WordPress updates, domain expiry, SSL, mailbox use and account access regularly. Small recurring checks are easier than emergency recovery.
Create a first-week operating checklist
Re-test contact or checkout flows from a phone, confirm analytics only after consent where required, inspect search-engine crawl basics, and make sure the production site has a recoverable backup. Launch traffic often exposes paths that staging never exercised.
Record who owns the domain, DNS, hosting and website administrator accounts. The best time to fix ownership and recovery is before the first employee, agency or contractor change.
Common questions
How soon should I submit a new website to Google?
Once the production site is ready and indexable, make sure the sitemap is available and Search Console is configured. Google still decides when pages are crawled and indexed.