Most people preparing a website launch work from some version of a checklist: set up analytics, write a meta description (the short summary that appears under your page title in search results), submit the site to Google, tell a few people about it. The trouble is that a checklist only tells you what you did. The Website Launch Promotion Checklist Scorer takes your answers to a structured set of launch tasks and turns them into a score, so you can see which parts of the launch are genuinely ready and which are still thin.
What the scorer does
The tool, available at Website Launch Promotion Checklist Scorer, walks through the tasks that tend to separate a launch that gets found from one that sits unseen: technical setup, on-page basics, promotion groundwork and measurement. You answer honestly for your own site, and it returns a score along with a breakdown by category. That breakdown is the useful part, because two sites can land on the same overall score for completely different reasons.
Why a list of ticks isn't enough
A plain checklist treats every item as equally important, so ticking off ten small jobs can look identical to ticking off two large ones, even though the two large ones might be doing most of the work. A business that has set up Google Search Console (Google's free tool for seeing how your site performs in search) but skipped meta descriptions on every page is in a different position from one that has written good meta descriptions but never verified the site with Google at all. Scoring by category rather than by a flat count is what makes those two situations visible instead of hiding them behind the same tick mark.
How the scoring works
The scorer groups tasks into categories that reflect the stages of getting a new site noticed, then weights your answers within each one before combining them into an overall percentage.
The categories it checks
- Technical readiness: whether the site is verified in Google Search Console, has a working robots.txt file (the file that tells search engines which pages they're allowed to visit), and loads correctly on mobile.
- On-page basics: whether pages have unique titles and meta descriptions, and whether the target keywords, the words a potential visitor might actually type into a search engine, appear naturally in the content.
- Promotion groundwork: whether you've identified the channels you plan to use to bring in early visitors, and whether any backlinks (links from other websites pointing to yours, which search engines treat as a signal of trust) are already in place or planned.
- Measurement: whether analytics and conversion tracking are set up before launch.
How the score is calculated
Each answer contributes points within its category, and the categories are weighted so that technical readiness and measurement carry more of the total than smaller, cosmetic tasks. The category scores are then combined into the overall percentage you see at the end. It's a rule-based calculation built from common launch practice, not a prediction of how your site will actually perform once it's live, and it can be wrong for a site with unusual circumstances, so treat the output as a starting point for a conversation about gaps rather than a verdict.
Using the scorer step by step
- Open the launch checklist scorer and work through each question against your actual site.
- Answer every item, including the ones that feel obvious, because a category with several small gaps often scores lower than one with a single large one.
- Look at the category breakdown before the overall score. A low score in measurement matters more early on than a low score in a category you plan to build up over the following weeks.
- Fix the lowest-scoring category first, then rerun the checklist to see whether the change moved the number you expected it to move.
A worked example
Say a small business has a site ready to launch: Google Search Console is set up, the homepage has a written meta description, but the other eight pages don't, there's no robots.txt file yet, and analytics was added the day before launch with no goals configured. On a flat checklist, that might read as "mostly done", because most of the individual boxes have some answer against them. Scored by category, technical readiness comes back weak because of the missing robots.txt, on-page basics comes back weak because eight of nine pages have no meta description, and measurement comes back weak because there's nothing set up to show whether visitors do anything once they arrive. The overall percentage ends up low, and the breakdown points straight at the fix: robots.txt, meta descriptions, and a few tracking goals, in that order, before spending any time on wider promotion.
Common mistakes when scoring a launch
- Answering for the plan, not the site. If a task is scheduled for next week, it isn't done yet, and scoring it as done just hides the gap until launch day arrives.
- Treating the overall score as the target. A high overall score with one category left almost empty is a worse position than a moderate score spread evenly, because the weak category is usually where visitors first drop off.
- Running the checklist once and never again. Sites change in the weeks around launch, so a score taken a fortnight before launch can be out of date by the day the site actually goes live.
- Skipping measurement because it feels like the least urgent category. Without it, there's no way to tell later whether any of the promotion work that follows launch actually did anything.
What to do with your score
A low score isn't a judgement on the site, it's a map of where the next few hours of work will do the most good. Once the checklist score looks reasonable across every category, the Website Launch Promotion Checklist guide sets out the fuller sequence of launch tasks in order, and the Promotion Channel Prioritiser can help decide which channels are worth the first weeks of effort once the technical and on-page groundwork is in place. If you want a wider view of what comes after launch, the Website Promotion Guides section covers the stages that follow, from search engine optimisation (SEO, the practice of improving a site so it appears higher in search results) through to paid channels.