The launch mistakes that make a new site invisible

The new site looks right, the owner is pleased, and a few weeks later it has fewer visitors than the old one. Almost every time, the cause is one of a short list of launch mistakes that nobody can see from the homepage.

Why a good site can disappear

Google does not know a site was redesigned. It knows the addresses it had, the pages it indexed, and the signals it reads from the code. A launch changes all of those at once. If any of them are wrong for even a couple of weeks, the site loses standing it took years to earn, and the owner finds out when the phone stops ringing.

None of the mistakes below are exotic. They are the same handful, over and over.

The mistakes we keep finding

• The site is still telling Google to stay out. While a site is being built, it lives at a private address, and we tell search engines not to index it. That setting has to be flipped at launch. It is one checkbox, and it is forgotten more than any other. A site with it still on can look perfect and never appear in a search.
• No sitemap, or an old one. The sitemap is a file listing every page you want found. A new site with no sitemap, or one still pointing to the old site's pages, leaves Google to discover pages on its own, slowly.
• Two versions of every page. With www and without. Secure and not. With a trailing slash and without. Each pair looks like two separate pages to Google, splitting the credit. The fix is to pick one form and send every other form to it, automatically.
• Old addresses that dead end. The old site had a page for exterior painting at one address. The new site has it at another. Anyone who follows the old link, including Google, hits a dead end, and the standing the old page earned is thrown away. Every old address needs a permanent forward to its new home.
• Tracking pasted into the wrong account. We have seen analytics pointed at the previous vendor's account, at a test account, and at a different client entirely. The owner thinks the site has no visitors. The visitors are being counted somewhere nobody is looking.
• The Google Business Profile still points at the old site. Or at a page that no longer exists.
• Forms that look like they work. The thank you message appears. The message goes nowhere.

The checklist we run before launch

Before a site goes live we work through a fixed list, the same one every time. Export every address from the old site and map each one to its new home. Confirm the indexing setting is on for the live site and off for the private one. Generate the sitemap from the new site and confirm every page is in it. Pick one address form and test that the others forward. Submit a test lead through every form and confirm it lands in the CRM and on the owner's phone. Confirm the analytics account is the client's own, not ours and not the last vendor's. Check the schema on each page type. Load the homepage on a phone.

Then we launch, and then we do most of it again against the live address, because settings that were right on the private site are sometimes different on the public one.

The Monday audit

The checklist catches what we can see on launch day. It does not catch the thing that changes a month later: a plugin update that re-enables the indexing block, a redirect that stops working, a form vendor that changes its code, a page that quietly starts returning an error. So every Monday an automated audit walks every client site, checks each of these items, checks speed, checks that the business facts match the Google profile, and sends a short report. Most weeks it says nothing changed. The weeks it says something are the weeks that would otherwise have cost a client a month of visibility.

The audit runs across every site we host, and the launch list runs before every site we ship, whether it is a landscaper's site or a product of our own.

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