The Technical SEO Checklist We Run on Every Launch

Most SEO damage doesn't come from bad content — it comes from launch day. A redesign that drops redirects, a staging site that gets indexed, a robots.txt copied to production with 'Disallow: /' still in it. We've audited enough post-launch disasters to turn prevention into a checklist. Here it is, the same one we run on every project we ship.

Before launch: protect what exists

• Crawl the old site and export every URL that has impressions in Search Console — this is the list nothing may break.
• Build a redirect map: every old URL 301s to its closest new equivalent. Not to the homepage — to the equivalent.
• Verify the staging site is not indexed (and never was — check with a site: search, not just robots.txt).
• Benchmark current rankings and organic traffic so post-launch movement is measurable, not anecdotal.

Launch day: the technical pass

• Robots.txt allows crawling; the sitemap is live, valid, and submitted in Search Console.
• Every page has exactly one H1, a unique title under ~60 characters, and a meta description written for clicks.
• Canonical tags point where they should — especially with URL parameters and pagination in play.
• Structured data (Organization, LocalBusiness, Service, Article, Breadcrumb) validates without errors.
• Core Web Vitals in the green on a real mid-range phone over a real network — not just in a desktop Lighthouse run.
• Redirects tested one by one on the launch checklist — sampling the map is how one broken money page slips through.

The week after: watch and fix

Launch isn't done at deployment. For the following week we watch Search Console daily: coverage errors, 404 spikes, mobile usability flags. Small issues caught in the first days cost nothing; the same issues discovered a month later have already burned rankings that take a quarter to rebuild.

“Google doesn't penalize redesigns. It penalizes redesigns done carelessly.”

The uncomfortable truth

None of this replaces content and authority — technical SEO is the foundation, not the house. But a technically broken site caps everything you build on it, and unlike content, these problems are entirely preventable with one disciplined afternoon. If you're planning a redesign and your current site already ranks for anything you care about, run this list — or send us the URL and we'll run it with you before you flip the switch.