The Post-Launch Website Checklist: The First 30 Days

Why the first 30 days matter

The launch itself is the loudest moment of a website project, and almost none of the work that determines its eventual performance happens on launch day. The 30 days that follow set the instrumentation, baselines, and rhythms that the 90-day playbook builds the next two phases on top of. A site that survives day 30 with clean data and a published-content cadence enters month two with compounding momentum; a site that does not enters month two starting from zero with worse data than it had at launch.

Week 1 — Instrumentation

The single highest-leverage week of the entire post-launch period. Verify analytics is firing on every page (GA4 or Plausible — not both, not neither), submit the sitemap to Search Console, ping the sitemap from robots.txt, and confirm conversion events appear in the analytics real-time view within sixty seconds of a test action. Run a UTM hygiene pass on every outbound link the team controls — paid ads, email signatures, partner placements — and confirm the parameters survive the redirect chain. If any of these fail, week 1 is not done.

Week 2 — Performance baseline

Real-world Core Web Vitals matter more than the lab numbers from launch QA. Pull the field data from Search Console or the Chrome UX Report after seven days of real traffic and capture the LCP, INP, and CLS for the top five landing pages. Run a mobile-only audit on the same five pages — most performance regressions hide on devices the launch team did not test on. Sweep the image library for anything over 200KB that should not be, and triage the error log for any 4xx or 5xx that started appearing post-launch.

Week 3 — Content rhythm started

Publishing one post in week 3 is non-negotiable. The post does not need to be a flagship — it needs to be live, internally linked, and indexed. After it ships, run an internal-link sweep across the site so the new entry has at least two inbound links from existing pages and at least three outbound links into existing topical clusters. Validate FAQ schema on any page that uses it; the JSON-LD often breaks silently under CMS edits and the rich-result eligibility evaporates without warning.

Week 4 — Conversion event audit

The audit that almost every team skips. Walk through every primary CTA on the site as a real user would, on a real device, with browser cookies cleared. Did the conversion event fire in analytics? Did the UTM survive from first-touch to form-fill? Did the form's auto-reply land in inbox rather than spam? The auto-reply check matters more than teams realize — a confirmation email going to spam looks indistinguishable from "form is broken" to the buyer who just filled it out. Fixing deliverability in week 4 saves a quarter of recovering trust.

End of day 30

Day 30 is the decision point. Either the data is clean, the rhythm has started, the conversion event is firing end-to-end, and the team extends into the next 60 days of the parent playbook — or one of those is broken, and weeks 5 through 8 should repeat the failed week rather than layer on new work. Which path applies depends on the integrity of the work just done. Teams shipping with our Websites practice run this checklist as part of every engagement; real estate teams launching lead-gen sites particularly benefit from the week 4 deliverability audit, since lead notification email is the live wire of the entire model.

If your team just shipped a site and you are staring at day 7, send us your site URL. We will run the first three weeks of the checklist live with you and flag what is missing before momentum dies.