SEO Tasks for a Successful Website Launch

Updated: 6/1/2026
The following website launch checklist outlines essential SEO housekeeping tasks to complete before or during your website launch. Completing this checklist will help your website retain its ranking in the transfer of one website to another. The items on this list do not need to be done in this order. And there are other critical SEO measures to help your website rise in search rankings.

Website Launch Checklist

1. Create and Upload an XML Sitemap
   XML sitemaps help search engines identify and index pages & content on your site. If you are using WordPress, try the Google site map generator plugin. This one is great, as it will automatically update your sitemap whenever you add or remove a post or page. XML Sitemap Generator is another source for validating your XML sitemaps.
2. Submit Your Site to Search Engines Once you have your sitemap, upload it to your Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster dashboards. An important step for launch is submitting your newly developed site to search engines. You can use a tool, but it might be best to manually submit your site to the major search engines like Google and Bing (which also handles Yahoo).
3. Install Google Analytics Code (or whatever you’re using to track your website)
   Check your old site and make sure to insert the same analytics code in your new site. This will ensure your reporting is not interrupted and provide a mechanism to track your new website’s success. Don’t forget to check your documentation for which goals your company is tracking. Then make sure to change to the new site’s URLs to keep tracking your business goals.
4. Check Your Robots.txt File
   Your robots.txt file is often set to block search engine spiders on your development website. Make sure you check this file and that it is not blocking robots at launch.
5. Put Your Page Redirects into Place
   Your new site will have different page URLs than your old site. This might be as simple as www.mysite.com/services becoming www.mysite.com/seo-consulting-services.  Make sure your old website links are permanently redirected (using 301 redirects) to the new page URLs. This is similar to telling the post office where you’ve permanently moved and to send your snail mail to the new address. You’ll need to determine whether you want your site to resolve to www.mysite.com or mysite.com.
6. URL Canonicalization
   This is actually a pretty simple but important step for ensuring that your website resolves to the same address and that your analytics correctly counts page views. In addition, search engines might ding you if you don’t address this. They’ll flag your site as having duplicate content or possibly index the wrong page rather than the one you intend.

Each of these items offers strong SEO support for your website launch and is important to its success and ongoing SEO performance. SEO is an ongoing effort, but ensuring these website launch items are complete will make ongoing SEO much easier.