Checklist: before your website goes live

Before you hit publish, spend an hour going through the site as if you were a stranger who found it by accident. Most of the problems that make a new site look sloppy — a phone number that doesn't work, a page that shows placeholder text, a form that quietly eats messages — are easy to catch beforehand and awkward to fix after a customer has already seen them. Here's the run-through worth doing.

Check that people can actually reach you

This is the whole point of the site, so start here. Click your phone number on your own phone and confirm it dials the right number. Send yourself a message through the contact form and check it lands somewhere you'll actually see it — not a mailbox nobody opens. Email the address on your contact page and make sure it doesn't bounce.

A café we heard about launched with the owner's old private email buried in the form settings. Bookings went there for three weeks before anyone noticed. Ten minutes of testing would have caught it.

• Test every phone number, on a real phone.
• Submit the contact form and confirm the message arrives.
• Check your address and opening hours are correct and current — including any holiday closures.
• If you show a map, confirm the pin is on your actual door, not a similar street name in the next town.

Read every page out loud

Placeholder text has a habit of surviving. "Lorem ipsum", "Your text here", "Insert description", or a heading that still says "Home Page Draft" — these slip through because you stop reading pages you've looked at a hundred times. Reading out loud forces you to slow down and notice.

While you're at it, check the small human details:

• Your business name spelled the same way everywhere.
• Prices and services that match what you actually offer today, not last year.
• The year in any copyright line at the bottom.
• No leftover test content, like "asdf" or a fake staff member called "John Test".

Ask someone who doesn't work with you to read it too. A two-van electrician might know exactly what "periodic inspection and testing" means; a homeowner reading it cold might not. If a normal person can't tell what you do within a few seconds, the words need work.

Click everything, on a phone

Most of your visitors will arrive on a phone, so look at the site on one before you launch. Open every page. Tap every button and link. Broken links and buttons that go nowhere are the digital equivalent of a locked front door with the "Open" sign lit.

• Does the menu open and close properly on a small screen?
• Are photos loading, or do you see broken-image icons?
• Is any text cut off or overlapping?
• Do links to your Instagram, booking tool or menu PDF actually open the right thing?

Check it on a friend's phone too, ideally a different brand from yours. Something that looks fine on your device can misbehave on another.

Sort out the boring-but-important pages

Depending on where you are and what you do, you'll likely need certain legal pages — an imprint or business identification, a privacy notice explaining what happens to data from your contact form, and possibly cookie information. The exact requirements vary by country and by what your site does, so don't guess: check with someone who knows the rules for your situation. Missing or wrong legal pages are a genuine risk, not just a formality.

Two practical things you can check yourself:

• Make sure these pages exist and are linked from the footer, not hidden.
• Make sure the details on them match your real business — same name, same address as everywhere else.

The final launch-day pass

Once the content is right, do a short technical sweep. You don't need to understand how any of it works — you just need to confirm it's switched on.

1. Secure connection: the address should start with "https" and show a padlock, not a "Not secure" warning.
2. Correct domain: the site loads on your real web address, not a temporary one your builder used while working.
3. Search visibility: many builders have a "hide from search engines" or "maintenance mode" switch that's on during the build. Turn it off, or Google will never find you.
4. A favicon and page titles: the little browser-tab icon and the title text should say your business name, not "Untitled".

Run through this list, then get one other person to open the finished site cold and tell you what they'd do next. If they can find your number, understand what you offer, and reach you without frustration, you're ready to go live.

If you're building the site yourself, a tool like Foliovo keeps most of these switches in one place so there's less to hunt for — but the checklist above works whatever you build with.