Playbook 5: Launch day and the first month

Before the switch

The client reviews the full site on staging and we verify the acceptance criteria from the proposal with them, item by item, with evidence. Internal QA covers every template on desktop and mobile, every form end to end with a real submission, every redirect in the map, and the structured data on one page of each template.

On the day

1. Point the domain and DNS to the new site and confirm the certificate.
2. Deploy the redirect map and test the most-visited old URLs from the baseline by hand.
3. Submit the sitemap in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
4. Define every conversion explicitly: each form, each download, each booking. A form that is not defined as a goal gets reported as zero leads, which reads as a dead site when the real problem is a missing setting.
5. Install the Orbit pixel and add the site to Orbit, which starts collecting search, visitor and lead data from day one.
6. Fill the baseline column in the keyword sheet with today's position for every target term.
7. Update the Google Business Profile when the business has a local presence.

The first two weeks

Within days of launch we check Search Console for crawl errors, 404s and pages excluded from the index, and fix what the redirect map missed. We then test whether conversions are counted in every language. On one multilingual site the English contact requests were not being counted because the button text differed from what the tracking expected. That kind of gap stays invisible until someone compares submissions with reported leads.

The client gets a CMS walkthrough and the editing manual during this period. Every project includes three months of launch support, in which in-scope fixes are free.

What to expect, and what not to read into

Google needs between two and eight weeks to recrawl and re-rank changed pages, so early ranking movement is noise. The first weeks of analytics are noise too: a jump on the day the pixel was installed is the instrument switching on, and no trend means anything until about 28 days of data exist. We tell clients this before launch so the first report does not create panic or false hope.