I used to check small sites in a pretty shallow way before launch.
Open the homepage.
Click the main CTA.
Resize the browser.
Make sure nothing looks obviously broken.
If the page looked fine, I shipped it.
But the issues I kept missing were rarely visual.
A staging noindex tag was still there.
The canonical URL pointed to a preview domain.
A privacy or contact link returned 404.
The sitemap included old test pages.
The shared link preview looked broken.
The homepage copy was clear to me, but not clear enough for someone seeing it cold.
None of these are dramatic bugs.
But they matter because launch traffic usually comes in a short window. You post once on Product Hunt, Reddit, HN, a newsletter, or send the link to users. That first impression is shaped by more than the hero section.
So my pre-launch check changed.
Now I try to answer a few boring but useful questions:
- Can search engines index the right pages?
- Are canonical, sitemap, and robots signals consistent?
- Do trust links like privacy, terms, and contact actually work?
- Does the page explain what the product is and who it’s for?
- Does the link preview look reasonable when shared?
- Are there any leftover staging or test signals?
- For AI/devtool sites: is there enough public context for an assistant to summarize it correctly?
That last one is becoming more important for me.
I don’t think anyone can honestly promise “AI visibility.” But many sites accidentally make themselves harder to understand: thin copy, missing docs, blocked crawlers, placeholder llms.txt, unclear positioning.
Before sharing a site now, I try to ask:
If someone — or some crawler — sees this page without context, will they understand it correctly?
I turned this checklist into a small free tool here:
WebsiteReady launch checker
But the habit is the useful part:
Don’t only check whether the site looks finished.
Check whether it is ready to be discovered, shared, indexed, and trusted.
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