The website launch process, from intake to post-launch

This page walks through the process I use to take a small business website from the first conversation to a live site that is indexed, measured, and backed up. Owners can use it to see what a proper build involves before hiring anyone. Builders can use it as a runbook, especially at go-live, where launches quietly lose rankings and leads.

What you will do

Collect access and real content before design starts.
Research the market and the current site with real data, then lock the page list.
Build a design system from the real brand, then the site.
Review the site on a hidden copy, including at a 375 pixel phone width.
Pass a blocking pre-launch checklist, then go live with a redirect for every old URL.
Get the new site indexed, measured, and backed up.

The phases at a glance

Phase 0 decides whether to build at all, and phases 1 through 8 do the work. Launches are usually held up by missing access or owner content, not design or code, so the last column matters.

Phase	What happens	Who provides what
0. Intake and fit	Audit, demand check, and a written scope	Owner: logins and real content. Me: the rest.
1. Research and audit	Competitors, the current site, and today's rankings	Me
2. Strategy and URL map	The page list, target searches, and an inventory of old URLs	Me
3. Design system	Colors, type, and components from the real brand	Me, from the owner's brand files
4. Build	Pages, content, on-page SEO, forms, and Tag Manager	Me, from the owner's facts and photos
5. QA and client review	Mobile checks, self-review, and review rounds on a demo	Owner: change requests, then approval
6. Pre-launch checks	A checklist that blocks the launch until it passes	Owner: final check of contact details and prices
7. Go-live or migration	DNS, SSL, redirects, and verification	Owner: keeps the old hosting until verified
8. Post-launch	Indexing, profile cleanup, a ranking baseline, and a backup	Owner and me: review requests

Standards that apply to every phase

None of these bend for a deadline.

Real facts only

Real colors, photos, prices, hours, and service area, confirmed by the owner. No invented reviews, ratings, phone numbers, or statistics, including in structured data.

Nothing that looks template-generated

I study two or three of the strongest real sites in the business's line of work and match their layout density, photography, typography, and tone. Phase 3 lists the tells I remove.

Mobile checked at 375 pixels

Every page is checked at a 375 pixel width before anyone sees it. Mobile is part of the build, not a follow-up.

Demo pages stay out of search

Review copies carry <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> so an unfinished copy never competes with the real site. Production pages drop it and point their canonical URLs at the real domain.

Tag Manager on every page

Every production page ships with the business's own container snippet and real ID from the day it is built. Tracking added later then reaches every page with no site edits.

A redirect for every old URL

In a migration, every old address gets a permanent (301) redirect to its closest new page. That is what carries its search value across.

Proof before presenting

I review my own work first, fix what I find, and show the result with proof: a live link, a screenshot, or a test result.

Phase 0: Intake and fit

Look at the current site and the demand
A first-pass audit of the current site, plus real search volume for the business's services. For a new prospect, this includes a rebuilt demo homepage. A rebuild makes sense when people search for what the business sells, the owner is engaged, and the site is worth replacing.
Write down the scope
The pages and features, plus the monthly work after launch, such as maintenance, content, reporting, and Google Business Profile and review work.
Request access on day one
The domain registrar, DNS, ownership of the Google Business Profile, the current site's admin, and any analytics accounts. My notes record where each login lives, never the password.
Collect the owner's real content
Logo and brand files, real photos, prices, hours, the service area, and hard policies, such as keeping the street address off the site for a business that works at customers' homes.

Phase 1: Research and audit

The goal is to say, from data, where the business ranks, what it is missing, and who beats it.

Audit the competitors
Find the businesses that win the searches that matter, rank them by threat, and take apart their sites, offers, ads, and rankings.
Inventory the current site
Its platform, plugins, forms, tracking, hosting, and every page, including the URL structure the new site replaces.
Record a ranking baseline
Rankings nationally and inside the service area, the 12-month visibility trend, and the local map results, saved as the starting point for later reports.

Phase 2: Strategy and URL map

Pick the searches that bring paying work
From the keyword data, choose the money searches and sort the pages that serve them by priority.
Design the URL structure
A service page for each group of related money searches, location pages that pair a service with a town, and supporting pages such as about and contact. The service area pages guide goes deeper on location pages.
Give each page one target search
Every page gets one primary search it is built to rank for, with that search's real monthly volume beside it.
Record every old URL now
Pull the old site's URLs from its sitemap during strategy, so the redirect map for phase 7 is ready long before launch day.

Phase 3: Design system

Before any page is built, the business gets its own design system: colors, type, spacing, buttons, forms, and page sections, built from the real brand. I start from two or three of the strongest real sites in the niche, then check every component against these tells:

Looks generated	What I do instead
A purple or blue-to-purple gradient behind the headline	The business's real brand colors, with one accent color used sparingly
A centered headline with two buttons, then a row of three identical icon cards	Layouts built around the content, with one primary action per page
Everything centered, with the same rounded corners and padding on every section	Deliberate choices per element, and left-aligned text for anything longer than a line
Emoji or generic line icons as section markers	Real photos, real numbers, and typography
Invented testimonials, logo walls, and star ratings with no source	Real reviews with their source, or nothing until real ones exist
Copy that could describe any company in any town	Specific services, towns, and facts from the owner
The same default fonts every template ships with	One distinctive display face paired with a quiet body face

Phase 3 is done when the system looks like a real company in that line of work, not a template.

Phase 4: Build

Generate the repeatable pages
Service and location pages come from one template and a generator, so they stay consistent and can be regenerated when a detail changes. The homepage is written by hand.
Use real content only
Facts from the audit and the owner, real photos resized for the web with their location data stripped, and no invented numbers.
Cover on-page SEO on every page
A title of about 55 characters, a meta description of about 150, an H1 that names the target search, LocalBusiness structured data with verified facts only, a social sharing image with its width, height, and alt text set, and descriptive alt text on images.
Wire forms to a real handler
Every form posts to a server-side handler that logs the submission, emails the business and me, and shows a thank-you only when the message was received. Build contact forms that actually reach you has the full pattern.
Install Tag Manager on every page
The script goes immediately after the charset tag in the head, and the noscript part immediately after the opening body tag, with the business's real container ID. No container yet means creating one first: a placeholder ID tracks nothing and looks like it does. The GA4 and Tag Manager quickstart covers what goes inside.

Phase 5: QA and client review

Check every page at 375 pixels
The menu opens as a full-screen overlay and closes again, nothing scrolls sideways, tap targets are large enough, and the headline reads without zooming.
Review it adversarially
Three passes: design that looks generated, copy that claims something the business cannot back up, and technical faults. Confirmed findings get fixed first.
Run review rounds on a hidden demo
The review copy lives at a noindexed address. I capture every change request and deploy a new version each round until the owner approves one for launch.

Phase 6: Pre-launch checks

Phase 6 is a gate: the DNS change is not scheduled until every item passes. This is where launches break without anyone noticing, through a placeholder left in the structured data, a noindex tag copied to production, or a form nobody tested end to end. The full list is the pre-launch checklist.

Phase 7: Go-live or migration

When a new site replaces an old one on the same domain, permanent redirects are what carry the old pages' search value across.

Prepare the day before
Lower the domain's DNS TTL (to 300 seconds, for example) so the change and any rollback spread quickly. Stage the production files and redirect rules so the cutover takes minutes, and write down the rollback plan.
Point the domain at the new site
Change the domain's A record to the new server and issue the SSL certificate. Keep the old hosting until the new site is verified live and indexed.
Apply the redirect map
Send every old URL from the phase 2 inventory to its closest new page with a 301. The homepage usually keeps its address. The map always includes:
- old money pages to their matching new pages, the redirects that carry the most value;
- pages with no equivalent to the closest new page or a section of the homepage;
- one version of the domain: http to https, and www to the bare domain or the reverse, matching the canonical the old site used;
- leftover system addresses from the old platform, retired with a 301 or a 410, such as /wp-login.php, /xmlrpc.php, /wp-admin/, /wp-json/, and /feed/ after a move off WordPress.
Verify every redirect
Request each old URL and confirm a 301 to the right page. Then confirm the new pages return 200 over HTTPS with a valid certificate, and check the site on a phone.

location = /roofing-services/ { return 301 /roof-repair/; }
location = /about-the-company/ { return 301 /about/; }

curl -sI https://example.com/roofing-services/ | grep -iE "^(http|location)"

Expect a 301 status and a location header with the new URL. The rules above are nginx syntax; Apache and most hosting control panels have their own redirect settings.

Phase 8: Post-launch

Submit the sitemap
Submit the new sitemap in Search Console and watch the page indexing report for one to two weeks as old URLs drop out. On the same domain, the Change of Address tool does not apply; it is for moving to a new domain.
Retest on the live domain
Send a real form submission and confirm the email and the log line both arrive, then connect Tag Manager's preview mode to the live site.
Clean up the Google Business Profile
Resolve duplicate listings, fix the categories and service area, confirm the website link, and start asking recent customers for reviews. The Google Business Profile guide covers the details.
Set the ranking baseline
Record where the new site ranks at launch, then check it monthly against that starting point.
Back up and write it down
Put the live site's files in a private Git repository, and write down the hosting and redirect setup, how to verify it, and how to undo it.

After every launch

Each launch ends with a 15-minute retro. Anything forgotten at go-live goes on the checklist so it cannot be forgotten again, whatever blocked the launch gets requested earlier next time, and anything that made the result better becomes the default.