SEO launch checklist
Launching a new site or major redesign without basic SEO hygiene means search engines and social platforms will guess your titles, descriptions, and crawl rules — often incorrectly. This checklist covers the essentials you can verify in an afternoon, using SlashGit's free SEO tools. Work through each section before you flip the DNS or announce the release.
Step 1: Audit meta tags on every template
Each distinct page type — homepage, product, blog post, docs — needs a unique <title>, meta description, and Open Graph tags. Open the Meta Tags tool and preview how your URLs will appear in Google results and when shared on Slack, LinkedIn, or iMessage.
Check for these common launch bugs: duplicate titles across routes, descriptions longer than 160 characters (they get truncated), missing og:image (link previews look broken), and noindex left on from staging. Run the preview against at least your top five traffic pages, not just the homepage.
Step 2: Build campaign tracking URLs
Organic and paid launches need consistent UTM parameters so analytics can attribute signups. Use the UTM Builder to generate links for each channel: newsletter, Product Hunt, partner blog, Twitter/X, and paid ads. Standardize on naming — utm_source for the platform, utm_medium for the type (email, social, cpc), and utm_campaign for the launch name.
Document the UTM matrix in a shared sheet so marketing and engineering use the same links. Avoid changing parameter names mid-campaign; that splits your data across incompatible segments in Google Analytics or Plausible.
Step 3: Generate and submit your XML sitemap
Search engines discover new pages faster when you provide a sitemap. The Sitemap Generator builds a valid sitemap.xml from your URL list. Include all indexable pages; exclude admin panels, thank-you pages, and duplicate filter URLs.
After uploading the sitemap to your site root, submit it in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Set a reminder to regenerate the sitemap when you add a new section — stale sitemaps that omit recent blog posts slow indexing by weeks.
Step 4: Configure robots.txt
Your robots.txt tells crawlers what they may fetch. Open the Robots.txt generator and block paths that should never appear in search results: /admin/, /api/, staging subdomains, and internal search result pages. Do not block CSS or JavaScript unless you have a specific reason — Google needs those assets to render pages correctly.
Verify the file is reachable at https://yourdomain.com/robots.txt and returns a 200 status. A accidental Disallow: / during deploy has taken down entire sites from search overnight.
Step 5: Review on-page keyword balance
Before publishing cornerstone content, run your draft through the Keyword Density analyzer. Aim for natural usage of your primary keyword in the title, first paragraph, and one subheading — not stuffing. The tool shows whether you over-repeated a phrase or neglected related terms searchers actually use.
Pair this with a manual read: does the page answer the query in the first 200 words? Thin pages with perfect meta tags still rank poorly. Fix content first, then re-check density after edits.
Step 6: Post-launch verification
Within 48 hours of launch, confirm indexing with site:yourdomain.com in Google, test social previews again on a real share, and verify analytics receives UTM-tagged traffic. Add the sitemap URL to your deployment checklist so every release regenerates it automatically.
Also run a quick mobile check: tap your top landing pages on a phone and confirm titles do not truncate awkwardly in the browser tab and that hero text loads without layout shift. Core Web Vitals affect rankings indirectly through engagement signals, so note any LCP or CLS regressions in your launch retro and file fixes before the next content push.
Bookmark this kit for every ship: Meta Tags, UTM Builder, Sitemap Generator, Robots.txt, and Keyword Density. These five steps catch the SEO mistakes that are cheapest to fix before launch and most expensive to fix after.