By AldoMedia · August 2026
This is for a first website, or a rebuild going live next week. It is in phases, because the order matters more than the items do, and each links out to the page that carries the detail.
If you are keeping the same website and only moving it to a different host, use the website migration checklist instead: different job, different order.
Phase 1: before anything is built
Four decisions, none of which involve the website itself. They decide how much trouble you have for the next ten years.
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Register the domain in the business's own name
The registrant should be the business, at an email address the business controls and will keep when the person who set it up moves on. A domain registered to your designer, or to a personal mailbox, is the most expensive item on this page, and it stays invisible until you need to move something. How registration works covers the record, domain privacy keeps your details out of the public listing, and the name itself is a separate decision.
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Decide where the email will live
Email is a separate purchase from hosting, and this decision sets the records you then leave alone on launch day. The business email guide frames the choice and Microsoft 365 gives the honest test for whether you need it. If the domain already carries mail, keep that move out of the launch: email migration deserves its own day.
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Decide who maintains the site afterwards
Name a person out loud: who applies updates, who holds the logins, who gets called when a page breaks. If nobody is named the answer is nobody, and an unmaintained site is how sites like yours get compromised. On WordPress that is the question behind WordPress hosting; otherwise website security is the short version.
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Write the accounts down
Registrar, hosting, email and the site's own admin: where each lives, who holds the login, which card renews it. Keep the list somewhere that is not the website. If you are inheriting a site and cannot find any of it, taking over a website covers getting it back.
Phase 2: while the site is being built
Nothing is public yet. The purpose of this phase is to take work off launch day, because work done under pressure is work done badly.
- Keep the old site running. Cancel no hosting, mailbox or subscription while the replacement is unfinished. Cancelling early saves one billing period and can cost you the only surviving copy.
- Set the mailboxes up early and use them. Send and receive on each from an outside address, and live on them for a week before launch. No part of your email should depend on a change made under pressure.
- Sort the certificate. Some hosts will only issue one once the domain points at them, so find out which case you are in now rather than at the switch. SSL certificates explains what the padlock proves.
- Decide where form submissions go. Point them at a mailbox somebody opens: a shared address such as info@yourbusiness.com survives one person leaving.
- Back up the finished build before you point anything at it. Website backups covers what a copy has to contain before it counts as one.
Phase 3: launch day
The switch itself is one change: you point the domain's web records at the new hosting. Which records to change, which to leave alone and what to save first are on the website migration checklist, and DNS management explains the records themselves. Two decisions are yours alone on a launch.
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Pick the hour
Early in the day, early in the week, with the rest of the day free. Not the afternoon before a holiday, and not the morning a promotion starts. A DNS change is not instant, so choose an hour you can afford to spend watching.
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Have everything open before you change anything
The registrar login, the DNS panel, the hosting control panel, your saved copy of the records, and a phone with wifi switched off. The logins are what people discover they do not have at the worst possible moment. If the certificate could not be issued earlier, request it as soon as the switch is made.
Phase 4: the first hour
The ordinary post-switch checks are on the migration checklist: the www redirect, the certificate, mail in both directions, your own error page. Three more belong to a launch rather than a move, because on a move they were already working yesterday.
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Submit the form as a customer would, then find the message
Confirm which mailbox it reached, that it is not sitting in spam, and that you can reply straight to the address the sender typed.
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Use the site on a phone with wifi switched off
That is what somebody outside your office gets, rather than a cached copy of your own work. Tap the telephone number, tap the address, open the menu, read one page the whole way down.
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Confirm nothing is blocking indexing
This is the one to be paranoid about. Search engines left discouraged from the build, a leftover noindex tag, or a robots file copied from the staging server keeps you out of the results quietly, for months. Check the live pages themselves, not the settings screen meant to control them.
Phase 5: the first week
Tell the search engines the site exists
Add the site to a search console, verify it, usually with a DNS record, and submit the sitemap. Then stop. Appearing in search results takes time and nothing in week one shortens it.
Add analytics only if you will read it
If nobody will open the reports, skip it. Analytics puts a script on every page and changes what your privacy and cookie notices have to say. This site runs none, which is why our own cookie policy is short.
Keep the old service running
Give it a full week of ordinary use, because a week covers what only happens weekly: a Monday send, a weekend booking, a month-end job. The migration checklist covers cancelling safely.
Record the renewal dates
Domain, hosting, email and certificate, in the calendar the business already uses rather than one person's. An expired domain takes the website and the email down on the same morning: read what happens once now, while it is not relevant.
The things people forget
Everything above is ordinary practice. This part is why the page exists. Each was a five minute job at launch, and each turns up months later as a bad week.
| What gets forgotten | How it surfaces | The fix at launch |
|---|---|---|
| The domain is registered to whoever built the site | You cannot move or renew it, and you find out during a disagreement | Check the registrant now: domains guide |
| The contact form goes to a mailbox nobody opens | Enquiries look like they stopped. They sit in a mailbox nobody adopted | Submit the form, find the message, reply to it |
| No backup was taken before launch | An edit breaks a page and there is nothing to go back to | Take one and restore it once |
| Nobody recorded the renewal dates | The website and the email go dark on the same morning | Calendar entries in the business's name |
| The staging copy is still publicly reachable | Two versions compete in search results and the wrong one wins | Delete it, or put a password on it |
| Nobody owns the updates | Plugins age quietly until something automated finds them | Name the person and the day: WordPress security |
The first two rows cost real money and neither gets tested, because both look correct from the outside. Nothing on a website tells you its form is delivering into a mailbox nobody has opened.
The addresses of the old pages
A rebuild changes where the pages live, not only how they look. Every link a customer bookmarked or a leaflet was printed with then lands on your error page. Before the switch, list the old addresses that had visitors and set a redirect for each. It is a tedious hour once, and close to impossible in a month, when nobody remembers what the old page was called.
Everything that points at the site from outside it
Your website is not the only place your address appears. The business listing that shows on a map, your social profiles, email signatures, invoices, the van, the sign, the last box of cards. None of it updates itself, and none of it is anybody's job until you make it somebody's.
Whether anyone can actually change the site
Have whoever will be editing make one real edit before the launch is over: change a sentence, save it, load the live page and see it. If that cannot happen on the day it will not happen in six months, and the site goes quietly out of date.