Website launch monitoring checklist
Launches and redesigns are when robots rules, canonicals, redirects and schema are most likely to ship wrong. Use this list during the launch window, then leave a thinner watch running.
Updated 2026-09-01
Before launch
- Confirm staging robots.txt will not be copied to production.
- List representative URLs for every important template.
- Record current canonicals, titles and indexability as a baseline.
- Decide who owns Critical incidents on launch day.
Launch day
- robots.txt is reachable and does not Disallow the new IA.
- XML sitemap lists the new URLs and does not list noindexed leftovers.
- Homepage, money templates and legal pages are indexable as intended.
- Canonicals are self-referencing unless you meant a consolidation.
- Redirects from old URLs return a single hop to the right target.
- JSON-LD still parses on templates that need it.
- TLS and DNS match the new host.
The week after
- Watch Search Console crawl-access and Google-selected canonical if connected.
- Keep TechDash on a short interval for the launch URLs.
- Verify each incident after it is fixed, not just when the deploy finished.
TechDash can run this watch from a desktop machine with website health monitoring and noindex, canonical and robots checks.
Questions
How long should the intensive watch last?
Through the launch week and the first recrawl cycle. Then drop most URLs back to daily.
Buy the desktop licence. Keep the crawl data local.
One-off licence, 77 shipped checks, Slack/Teams/Discord alerts, and no monthly monitoring subscription. Current launch price: $89.50.