You're about to launch. Here's the checklist so it doesn't happen quietly.

A launch checklist and a promotion checklist are two different documents, and mixing them up is where most of the wasted effort starts. Before you send a single email or post a single link, the site itself needs to be in a state where visitors who arrive can actually do something useful, and where you can see what happens after they leave. Get this part right first, because every promotion channel you use later sends people to whatever state the site is in on the day you press go.

Before you write a single post or send a single email

The technical groundwork takes an afternoon, but skipping it means you spend the following months guessing.

• Set up Google Search Console, a free tool from Google that shows which searches bring people to your site and flags pages it cannot read properly
• Add a clear meta description to your main pages, the short summary that appears under your page title in search results and often decides whether someone clicks
• Check the site loads properly and looks right on a phone, since most UK visitors will arrive on one
• Confirm your contact details and any forms actually work, tested from a device that is not the one you built the site on
• Add structured data (schema markup), the extra code in a page that tells search engines what a piece of content actually is, such as an article, a product, or a set of frequently asked questions
• Add a robots.txt file, the plain text file at the root of your site that tells search engine bots which pages and folders they should leave alone, and point it at your sitemap so search engines know where to look
• Install basic analytics so you have a record of visitor numbers from day one.

Page speed is worth a look too, though a site that has only just gone live will not have much real-world data sitting behind it yet. The Core Web Vitals Checker takes a web address and a mobile or desktop choice, calls Google's own PageSpeed Insights service, and reads back three measures Google tracks from real visits to a page: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), how long the main content takes to appear; Interaction to Next Paint (INP), how quickly the page responds once someone taps or clicks something on it; and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), how much the layout jumps around while it loads. Each one is shown against Google's published thresholds, an LCP under 2.5 seconds is good and over 4 seconds is poor, an INP under 200 milliseconds is good and over 500 milliseconds is poor, a CLS under 0.1 is good and over 0.25 is poor, alongside a pass, needs-improvement or fail verdict. A site with few visitors so far often has no field data to show yet, since Google needs a run of real visits before it can report anything at that level, and the tool says so rather than guessing, offering the origin-level result for the domain instead where one exists. It runs from inside your browser calling Google's endpoint directly, so it can only ever show you what Google's own data already covers.

The structured data step is the one most people skip, mainly because writing that code by hand looks fiddly. The SEO Schema Generator builds it for you across three common cases, articles, products, and FAQ pages, and updates the output as you type. It also tells you, next to the output, which fields are still sitting on a placeholder rather than your real content, because publishing a page with a placeholder date or price baked into its schema is worse than having no schema at all. Treat what it produces as a draft to check, since a tool that generates code cannot tell whether the details you have typed into it are actually correct.

The robots.txt file causes similar trouble, because a single misplaced line can block a search engine from a directory you actually wanted indexed. The Robots.txt Generator walks through which bots you want to block, which directories to disallow, and where your sitemap sits, then produces a file ready to upload. It is worth checking the result against a robots.txt tester afterwards, since generating the file correctly and confirming it behaves as intended once it is live are two separate steps.

Working through this list one item at a time is easier than holding it all in your head. The website launch promotion checklist scorer lets you tick off each action as you complete it, from setting up Search Console to claiming your social profiles and getting your first backlink, and it returns a completion score along with a prioritised list of what to do next. It can only work from what you tell it, so treat the score as a prompt for where to focus rather than a verdict on how ready your site really is.

The first week after launch

This is when you tell people, and it is worth being deliberate about the order. Start with people who already know you: past clients, colleagues, anyone who has said they would look. Their response tells you something useful before you spend time on channels where you have no relationship at all. From there, submitting your sitemap through Search Console and checking your listing on any relevant business directories gets the groundwork done without needing a strategy yet.

Deciding which channels to try next is worth more thought than it usually gets, because social media, search, and paid options suit very different businesses and very different budgets. The channel prioritiser tool asks a few questions about your business and points you toward the channels most likely to fit. It is a starting point for judgement, so treat the result as a shortlist worth checking against your own knowledge of your customers.

Where launches usually go wrong

The most common mistake is promoting a site before analytics are running, so the first weeks of traffic, the ones that would tell you what actually worked, go unrecorded. The second is trying every channel at once, which spreads a small amount of time too thin to learn anything from any of them. The third is treating launch week as the whole campaign, when promotion is something you keep doing well after the excitement of going live has worn off.

The channels directory covers the options in more depth once you are ready to choose, and the guides section works through each one step by step.