Website launch plan

1. Pick the day you want to be live. A real date, not 'soon' — the arithmetic is the whole point.
2. Choose what you are launching: a one-page site, a small multi-page site, or a site with a store.
3. Read the runway figure. If your date is too soon, the plan says by how many days.
4. Work down the list. Anything marked critical blocks launch if it slips.
5. Watch for tasks marked as waiting on someone else — those are the ones you cannot rescue by working harder.
6. Copy the plan as text and put the first three dates in your calendar.

Two tasks genuinely resist compression whatever you do: taking photographs and Google Business Profile verification. If the plan says you are short, those are the two to start today regardless of everything else.

A website launch checklist is easy to find and easy to nod at. The reason it rarely changes anything is that a list of tasks with no dates has no beginning — everything looks equally urgent and equally postponable, so the whole thing gets postponed together.

Attaching a date to each item makes two things visible. The first is ordering: photography has to happen three weeks out not because it is hard but because everything downstream needs it. The second is collision — the moment where the plan meets your actual date and one of them has to give.

That collision is the finding. Being told on a Tuesday in March that your April launch is eleven days short is information you can act on: you either move the date or you decide, deliberately, which tasks get compressed. Discovering the same thing in launch week is not a decision, it is a scramble.

• Photographs. The single largest cause. Building the site is a short job once you have images; without them everything stalls, and 'I'll take some this week' becomes a month. This is why it sits three weeks out.
• Words. The second largest. Writing a homepage feels harder than it is, mostly because people try to write it in a text box inside a website builder. Draft it somewhere else first.
• Verification. Google Business Profile verification can require a postcard, which takes up to a fortnight and is entirely outside your control. Starting it in launch week means launching without it.
• Waiting on other people. Review replies, a photographer's availability, someone else's approval. The plan marks these separately because working harder does not speed them up.
• Domain access. Frequently a surprise. The domain is on an old account, or with an agency you no longer use, and recovering access takes days. Buying or confirming access is the first task for a reason.

What is not on that list: choosing a template, picking colours, or building the site. Those are the parts that feel like the project, and they are usually the shortest.

The plan continues past go-live for a reason. A site that is published and then never linked to is invisible, and a large share of "my website did nothing" turns out to be "nobody, including Google, knew it existed".

The day-after tasks are small and they compound: submit the site to Search Console, add the link to your Google Business Profile, and put the address everywhere your business name already appears — email signature, invoices, directories, the van. None of that takes more than an hour in total and it is the cheapest traffic you will ever get.

Then the thirty-day task, which is the one everyone skips: read your analytics and fix the single worst thing. One month in you have enough data to see where people leave. Change one thing, not five, so you can tell what worked.

Sometimes the date is not movable — a season starts, a lease begins, a competitor opened. In that case the question is what gets compressed, and some things compress far better than others.

Safe to compress: the number of pages, the polish, the product catalogue, the second round of copy editing. A one-page site with your real details is a legitimate launch, and adding pages afterwards costs nothing.

Compress with care: photography. Phone photographs of real work taken on the next job genuinely are acceptable and beat stock by a wide margin. What is not acceptable is stock photography, which reads as stock to almost everyone.

Cannot be compressed: verification waits and other people's response times. If Google needs to send a postcard, the postcard takes as long as it takes. Plan around it rather than into it.

Never compress: testing the contact form, and reading the site on a phone. Both take minutes and both catch the failures that are invisible from the outside and expensive for months.