A pre-launch checklist we run on every small business website

Most small business sites we build at HND Solutions go live with a short checklist that has saved us more than once. None of it is fancy. It's the stuff that's easy to forget when the client wants the site up by Friday.

Sharing it here in case it helps someone else shipping sites for local businesses.

Performance

• Compress and resize images before upload. A 4 MB hero photo from the client's phone is the most common reason a homepage feels slow.
• Serve images as WebP or AVIF where the stack allows it, with width and height set so the layout doesn't jump.
• Check the page on a throttled mid-range Android profile in DevTools, not only on a fast laptop. That's what most visitors here actually use.
• Lazy load anything below the fold, but never the main hero image.

Forms and tracking

This part decides whether the site is useful to the business at all.

• Submit every form yourself and confirm the email or CRM entry arrives.
• Make phone numbers tel: links so mobile users can tap to call.
• Set up GA4 events for form submits and call clicks before launch, not "later".
• Add a simple thank-you page so conversions can be tracked cleanly.

SEO basics

• Unique title and meta description on every page.
• One H1 per page that says what the page is about in plain words.
• An XML sitemap submitted in Search Console, and a robots.txt that isn't still blocking everything from the staging days (we've all done it).
• Redirects from old URLs if the business had a previous site.

The boring but important bits

• SSL working on both www and non-www, with one redirecting to the other.
• Backups scheduled and tested once.
• Admin accounts with strong passwords and no shared "admin/admin" login.
• Contact details on the site match the Google Business Profile exactly.

That last one sounds small, but a mismatched address or phone number causes more local search trouble than people expect.

If you're a business owner reading this rather than a developer, and you'd like someone to handle it end to end, our website development team in Ahmedabad works through this same list on every project.

Anything you'd add? I'm always curious what other people check before hitting publish.