Your new website has launched: the checks to run before you sign it off

A new website is easy to judge on looks, and looks are where most new websites do well. The trouble tends to sit underneath: in what happened to the old pages, in what nobody set up, and in who now holds the keys.

So this is the checklist to run in the week your new site goes live, before you pay the final invoice. Most checks take a few minutes and need no technical knowledge. Each one is cheap to fix while the project is still open, and awkward to fix once it has closed. It is the after-launch companion to how to choose a web designer, which covers the questions to ask before you sign.

1. Do your old pages still work?

If you had a website before, Google knows its addresses, and so do the links pointing at it from directories, social posts and other sites. When a new site goes live with different addresses, each old one needs a permanent redirect (a “301”) to its new equivalent. Without them, every link and every ranking the old page had simply stops.

You can check this yourself:

1. Go to the Wayback Machine and look up your domain. It lists the addresses it saved from your old site.
2. Open each old address on your live site.
3. Each should land on the matching new page. Not an error page, and not the homepage for everything.

A careful agency will have done this already, including the odd misspelt address and old blog tag pages. If yours did, say thank you. If you land on “page not found”, ask for redirects before you sign off. Google’s own guidance on moving a site with URL changes explains why it matters.

Also notice what has gone. If a service had its own page on the old site and has no page at all on the new one, that service has stopped being findable. Make sure that was a decision, not an accident.

2. Can anyone measure what it is doing?

Ask one question: “How will I know if the new site is bringing in work?”

The honest answer needs three things, set up in your name:

• Analytics, so you can see visits and where they come from. A privacy-friendly tool is fine; see Plausible vs Umami vs Fathom.
• Google Search Console, so you can see which searches show your site, which pages are indexed, and whether Google has found problems.
• Enquiry tracking: counting the clicks on “call”, “WhatsApp” and “send”, so you know which pages produce leads.

A website nobody can measure is a website nobody can prove is working, including the people who built it. If none of this exists at launch, you have no “before” to compare with, and every conversation about results becomes opinion.

3. Whose photos are on it?

Look at the big photo at the top of your homepage and ask whether a customer could tell it is yours. Then look at the top of your service pages.

For a trade, this matters more than almost anything else on the page. People hire on evidence of the work. If the hero photo could be any company in any country, it is telling your customers nothing about you, and the careful ones notice. A quick tell for stock: details that do not fit where you work, such as scenery or road signs from another country, or equipment you do not use.

Your own photos, even from a phone, beat polished stock every time once they are edited properly. If you supplied photos and the site uses stock instead, ask why.

4. How heavy is it?

Most of your visitors are on a phone, often on mobile data. A page loaded with full-size photographs can be several megabytes, which is slow to arrive and can jump around as it loads.

Run your homepage and one service page through PageSpeed Insights. The two numbers to watch are:

• Largest Contentful Paint: how long the main content takes to appear. Google’s “good” mark is 2.5 seconds or less.
• Cumulative Layout Shift: how much the page jumps while loading. “Good” is 0.1 or less.

The usual culprit is images: one big photo served to every screen size, in an old format. Properly sized images, in modern formats such as WebP or AVIF, often cut the weight by more than half without anyone noticing a difference. The thresholds come from web.dev; our Core Web Vitals guide goes further.

5. Who holds the keys?

Write down where each of these lives, and whose name is on it:

• the domain (the registrar account)
• the DNS (often Cloudflare, now that many sites sit behind it)
• the hosting
• the code, or the site builder account
• the analytics and Search Console

All of them should be in the business’s name, with your designer added as a user. Whoever holds the DNS account controls where your domain points and where your email goes. If you ever part ways, you want to take the website with you, not ask for it back.

Also ask how you change things. Some modern sites are hand-built, which can make them fast and tidy, but it can also mean every new photo or price change goes through the agency. That can be fine. Just know it before you sign up for a monthly care plan, not after.

6. Can someone pretend to be you by email?

When a site moves, the domain’s DNS often moves too, which makes it the right moment to check your email protection. Look up your domain on any online DMARC checker. If the record says p=none, it only watches: anyone can still send email that claims to come from your address.

A sensible path is to move to p=quarantine and then p=reject once you are sure your real email passes. The NCSC’s guidance explains the steps, and why business emails go to spam covers the other side of the same records.

7. Can a customer check every claim?

Badges such as “approved by” a trade body, “fully insured” or “5 stars from N reviews” persuade people, as long as they can check them. Each accreditation should link to your real profile on that body’s site. Review counts typed into the page go out of date the day you get another review, so link to the live reviews instead.

This is also a legal point. Claims a customer cannot verify are the kind the UK’s consumer rules are getting stricter about; see what the DMCC Act means for reviews.

A note on location pages

Many trade sites now launch with a page for every nearby town or suburb. Done well, that helps people find you. Done at scale, with the same page reworded dozens of times, it runs into Google’s rules on doorway pages and scaled content. Ask how the location pages were written and whether you genuinely work in every place listed. We have written a full guide to when location pages help, and when they hurt.

Before you pay the final invoice

None of this is about catching anyone out. A good designer will have most of it covered and will fix the rest without fuss, because it is part of doing the job properly. The point is to ask while the project is open, when each fix is a small job, rather than months later, when you notice the phone has gone quiet and nobody can tell you why.