Prelaunch Checklist

Things that should be checked off (where appropriate) before we consider a site ready to launch.

Front End

  • Meta data included and appropriate
  • Facebook OpenGraph tags properly set up
  • Page titles are descriptive and SEO friendly
  • Images have appropriate alt text
  • Images have been optimised
  • CSS/JS minified
  • Favicon created and displayed
  • App icons created and displayed
  • Analytics installed and reporting
  • 404 page exists and is informative
  • Javascript console messages suppressed/removed
  • Unsupported browser/platform messages in place
  • Does the site have RTL locales? Have you used direction: rtl; to mirror things?

Back End / Platform

  • Default CMS user account created
  • Test data removed from DB
  • Debug modes turned off
  • Setup Sentry logging/reporting
  • Lockdown/htpasswd removed
  • Ensure GZIP is serving assets.
  • Third party
  • Facebook Sandbox turned off
  • Ensure all third party paid services have billing set up (no trials)

Sysadmin

  • Ensure infrastructure backup is in place
  • Ensure DB backup is in place
  • New server environment is ready for live
  • Logging system updated for live

Post Launch

If using any Facebook services, such as sharing, remember to also enter your URL into the Facebook Debugger (https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/) after your site goes live, to ensure the Facebook Cache is cleared. This will prevent 403 Authentication Required errors when sharing your site now that .htpassword has been removed.