Before your website goes live: a business owner’s checklist

You do not need to understand every technical detail to accept a website confidently. You do need to know what you own, how customers use it and who looks after it. Use the following checks during handover and record the answers in a shared project document.

1. Confirm ownership and ongoing costs

Make sure your business can access the domain and hosting accounts through an appropriate business email. Record renewal dates and the person responsible for them. A domain is the address; hosting runs the site. Losing access to either can disrupt normal operations.

Ask for a list of paid services, theme or plugin licences, storage and maintenance arrangements. Separate one-off project costs from renewals and future content work. Do not leave these details inside a former employee’s personal account.

2. Test a real customer journey on your phone

Choose an ordinary task: find a service, understand its scope and send an enquiry. Complete it on a small phone screen using mobile data as well as on a desktop. Check that menus open, text is readable, buttons are easy to tap and important content is not hidden by decorative effects.

Send a test form with realistic information. Confirm that it reaches the intended recipient and that the visitor sees a clear confirmation. Also test missing fields and a mistyped email. A form that looks finished but silently fails is not ready for handover.

3. Check content as carefully as appearance

• Service descriptions match what you actually provide.
• Contact details, opening hours and relevant locations are correct.
• Portfolio images are yours to use and have useful descriptions.
• Prices, where shown, explain their scope and exclusions.
• Each language has been reviewed independently, including buttons and forms.
• No draft text, sample customer quote or unused demonstration page remains public.

For a multilingual business, do not review only the homepage. A visitor should be able to complete the whole journey in the chosen language, including the confirmation after submitting a request.

4. Ask for a maintenance and recovery demonstration

Have the person responsible show where backups are stored and explain how a restoration is tested. Agree who applies updates and what happens if a change breaks a form or page. Give team members access appropriate to their work rather than sharing one administrator account.

Keep an inventory of forms and the information each asks for. If a field has no clear use, question whether it belongs there. Your handover document should name the person who receives enquiries and the process for handling them.

5. Check search readiness without expecting instant rankings

Confirm that public pages are accessible, have meaningful titles and are linked from the site. Review the sitemap and any settings that block indexing. Google explains that a sitemap helps discovery but does not guarantee that every URL will be crawled or indexed. Google’s sitemap guidance.

Request access to the site’s Search Console property when it is configured. Treat indexing reports as diagnostic information, not a promise of traffic. A technically accessible page still needs useful, accurate content.

A simple handover test

Ask a colleague unfamiliar with the project to find one service and send a test enquiry without instructions. Note every moment of hesitation. Resolve failed tasks before launch and keep less urgent improvements in a dated list. For an earlier-stage project, start with our needs-assessment brief.