Your First Week After Launching a Website: An Operations Checklist

Your website is live. Now check whether a customer can send an enquiry, make a booking, or complete an order, and whether your team can recover the site if something goes wrong.

Use the first week to work through the checks below. The days are a suggested order, so bring urgent work forward. A failed checkout or missing enquiry needs attention as soon as you find it.

Keep a shared record of each check, who owns it, and what happened. By the end of the week, you should have evidence that the important tasks work and a clear plan for anything still unresolved.

Conceptual illustration of the checks to complete during the first week after launch.

Day 1: complete the customer's main task

Start with the action your website exists to support. For a service business, that might be an enquiry or appointment. For a shop, it's an order.

Open the site in a private browser session on a phone and a desktop. Stay logged out of the administration area: a visitor should be able to complete the task without your account's privileges.

Follow the whole journey:

• Find the relevant service or product from the homepage.
• Submit the form, request the appointment, or follow the payment provider's approved test procedure.
• Check the confirmation shown to the visitor.
• Verify the message reaches the intended inbox or the expected booking or order record appears.

A form saying "sent" is only part of the check. Someone at the business needs to receive the enquiry and know how to respond.

Ask a colleague to repeat the journey from another connection. A phone using mobile data is useful where practical. Check phone links, maps, and downloads along the way. This helps expose everyday usability problems, though it doesn't replace an accessibility audit.

Record any point where the customer can't finish. Fix those problems before spending time on cosmetic adjustments.

Follow the task through to the record received by the business.

Day 2: check the public site and its addresses

Visit the pages customers are most likely to use, including contact details, service information, and any delivery or booking terms.

Confirm that:

• Pages load over HTTPS without certificate warnings.
• The domain variants you intend to support, such as addresses with and without www, reach the correct site.
• Important redirects lead to the intended page.
• Temporary production passwords or launch restrictions have been removed.
• Business names, addresses, opening hours, and contact details are correct.
• Placeholder text and test content are gone.

Check the production site's search visibility settings, too. Keep staging and test copies protected when removing restrictions from the public site.

Note which outside services the customer journey relies on. Email delivery, maps, booking systems, and payment providers may each have a different support contact. Record the relevant contact so a future fault has somewhere to go.

Day 3: confirm ownership and access

Make sure the business controls its domain registration, DNS, hosting, and recovery email accounts. DNS is the set of records that directs the domain to your website and other services.

Check who receives renewal notices and whether the recovery methods are current. If a developer or agency manages an account, document how the business can regain access when the relationship changes.

Give each collaborator the access their work requires. A person updating opening hours may need content-editing access without server administration privileges. Keep credentials in an appropriate password manager.

Your operating record should identify who owns each account and where authorized staff can find access instructions. Leave passwords, recovery codes, and sensitive customer information out of the shared checklist.

Day 4: prove you can restore a backup

Find out what is backed up, how often backups run, how long they are retained, and who can restore them. Check the most recent completed backup rather than relying on a setting that says backups are enabled.

For WordPress, a complete recovery normally needs both the database and the site files. Downloading the website directory alone doesn't capture its database. The WordPress backup handbook explains the two parts.

Where practical, restore a backup into an isolated test environment. Check that page content, uploaded media, and configuration are present. Disable outbound customer messages and payment processing before using a restored test copy.

Record which backup was restored, what you checked, and any missing data. If you can't run a restore test, mark recovery as unverified and assign someone to arrange it. A completed backup and a successful restore are separate results.

Restore both files and database into an isolated test environment, then verify the result.

Day 5: make monitoring useful

Choose monitoring that checks a meaningful public page or endpoint. A responding server doesn't prove an enquiry form works, so add a supervised check of the main customer workflow where feasible.

Decide which failures need immediate attention and which can wait for the maintenance review. Send urgent alerts to someone able to act, with a backup contact if needed.

Test notification delivery. Confirm the alert reaches its intended recipient and gives enough context to start investigating: the affected service, the time of the failure, and who should handle it.

Keep routine logs available for review without sending every entry to the business owner. Review application errors, failed transactions, and missing form submissions for problems that a simple uptime check could miss.

Day 6: plan the first update

Record the application's current versions before making changes. For WordPress, include the core software, active plugins, theme, PHP version, and database version.

Compare the hosting environment with the current WordPress requirements. Check the PHP support schedule when planning runtime upgrades; application compatibility and ongoing support both matter.

Ask the maintainer to review compatibility before changing several layers at once. Use a staging rehearsal where possible and have a recoverable backup ready. Keep test and production credentials separate.

After an update, repeat the customer journey from Day 1. If enquiries or orders stop working, the update needs further attention even if the pages still load.

Keep recovery ready and repeat the customer journey after making changes.

Day 7: review results and hand over the routine

Look back at the week's real enquiries, order errors, alerts, and customer feedback. Check whether messages arrived, payments failed, or application errors appeared. Decide which issues need the site developer, hosting provider, or an outside service's support team.

Put unresolved work in order:

1. Problems preventing customers from completing a task.
2. Important operational gaps, such as unverified recovery or missing account ownership.
3. Optional refinements that can wait.

Give each item an owner and a due date. Link to its support ticket where one exists, and record the outcome when it's resolved.

Keep the handover record short enough to use:

Set a regular maintenance review to check form delivery, failed transactions, backups, available storage, updates, errors, and public business details. Review the operating record after a major change.

Finish the week by booking that next review and naming the person responsible. The website should be something your team can operate, recover, and hand over with confidence.

Sources checked on 2 October 2026. The cover is a conceptual illustration; the other graphics are explanatory diagrams.