Website Launch Checklist for Funded Startups: SEO, AEO, Analytics, Performance and Legal

Most launch problems are small and boring: a staging noindex left on, a form that never reaches the CRM, analytics that fire before consent. Check five areas before you go live, search, answer engines, analytics, performance and legal, and the first month is spent on growth instead of fixes.

This is the list we run at DesignMe before a new site goes live for a funded startup. It applies just as well to a B2B manufacturer or a DTC brand launching a new site. If you’re replacing an existing site and need to protect its traffic, start with our redesign and migration checklist and use this one alongside it.

Before anything: ownership and access

Make sure the company owns the domain, DNS, hosting, CMS, analytics, Search Console and tag manager accounts, with at least two people who can log in. Agencies and freelancers should be added as users, not owners. It takes ten minutes now and saves weeks if someone leaves.

Search: the basics Google needs

• Remove the staging noindex. Staging sites are usually hidden with a noindex tag or header, and it is easy to ship to production. Check the live homepage source on launch day.
• Don’t use robots.txt to hide pages. Google is clear that robots.txt is not a way to keep a page out of its results. Use noindex or a password for that.
• Submit the sitemap. Add it in Search Console’s Sitemaps report and list it in robots.txt.
• Set canonical tags. Each page should point a canonical at its own preferred URL. Google says not to use robots.txt for canonicalisation.
• Titles and descriptions. Unique on every page. We keep titles at 60 characters or less with the main keyword first, and descriptions between 120 and 160 characters.
• One H1 per page, with headings that form an outline.
• Open Graph tags and a share image, so links look right in Slack and LinkedIn.
• A useful 404 page that links to the main sections.

Answer engines: being readable by AI

Buyers now ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google’s AI features who to hire and what to buy. The good news is that most of this work is the SEO above. Google’s own guidance says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special structured data to add.

What’s worth checking on top:

• Crawler access. Each AI company runs separate crawlers. OpenAI’s OAI-SearchBot surfaces sites in ChatGPT search, while GPTBot collects training data. Anthropic runs Claude-SearchBot for search quality and ClaudeBot for training. PerplexityBot surfaces sites in Perplexity and, according to Perplexity, is not used to train foundation models. Allow the search crawlers unless you have a reason not to, and decide about training crawlers separately.
• Plain HTML. Many AI crawlers don’t run JavaScript, so text that only appears after a script or inside a tab can be missed. Check the page source, not the rendered page.
• Structured data. Google recommends Organization markup on the homepage or about page, and Article or BlogPosting markup on posts, with dates and authors.
• Answer-first pages. Pricing, how it works, comparisons and FAQs, each opening with a plain answer. Our AEO guide covers this in detail.
• llms.txt, honestly. An llms.txt file is a Markdown map of your site, proposed by Jeremy Howard in 2024. Google’s July 2026 guidance says Google Search ignores it, so it does nothing for Google. Some other tools read it, and it’s cheap to generate from your content, which is why we publish one, but it isn’t a launch requirement.

Run the homepage through our free AEO checker before launch. It reads the page as AI crawlers do, from the raw HTML, and gives a fix for every gap.

Analytics: measure from day one

• Pick three conversion events before launch, such as demo booked, contact form sent and signup started, and test that each one fires.
• Load tags only after consent for visitors who need it (see the legal section). Google’s Consent Mode v2 adds the ad_user_data and ad_personalization signals, and Google requires consent to keep using its tags for measurement and ad personalisation for users covered by its EU user consent policy. On our own site, Google Tag Manager loads only after a visitor allows analytics or marketing, with every consent signal denied by default.
• Set GA4 data retention to 14 months, the longest option for standard properties, so year-on-year comparisons work.
• Verify Search Console and link it to analytics.
• Use UTM tags on launch posts, emails and ads, so you know what the launch actually drove.

Performance: fast on a phone

Google’s Core Web Vitals call a page good when the largest element loads within 2.5 seconds (LCP), the page responds to input within 200 milliseconds (INP) and layout shift stays at 0.1 or less (CLS), measured at the 75th percentile of page loads. INP replaced First Input Delay as a Core Web Vital in March 2024.

Test on a mid-range phone on a mobile connection, not on the office laptop. The usual culprits are oversized images, too many fonts, video that autoplays above the fold and third-party scripts such as chat widgets and booking embeds. Load embeds when the visitor clicks or scrolls to them, not on page load.

Legal: the basics for US and EU visitors

This is general information, not legal advice. Check the specifics with your counsel.

• Privacy policy that says what you collect, why, who you share it with and how people contact you.
• Cookie consent in the EU and UK. Non-essential cookies need prior consent. The EU Court of Justice ruled in Planet49 (2019) that a pre-ticked box is not valid consent, and France’s CNIL says refusing cookies should be as easy as accepting them. A “Reject all” button next to “Accept all” covers most of it.
• California. The CCPA applies to businesses over $26,625,000 in annual revenue (the 2025 adjusted threshold), or that buy, sell or share the personal information of 100,000 or more California consumers or households, or earn half their revenue from selling it. Covered businesses need a privacy policy, a “Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information” link if they sell or share data, and must honour Global Privacy Control signals.
• Accessibility. The European Accessibility Act has applied since 28 June 2025 to services such as e-commerce and consumer banking, with an exemption for service providers under 10 staff and €2 million turnover. DTC brands selling into the EU are the startups most likely to be covered. Even when it doesn’t apply, contrast, labels, alt text and keyboard use are worth checking for every visitor.
• Germany. If you run a business site aimed at Germany, the Digital Services Act (DDG) has required an easily found, always available provider notice, the Impressum, since 14 May 2024.
• Terms of service if visitors can sign up, buy or download anything.

Forms and integrations

Submit every form on the live site and follow it all the way: the confirmation message, the email, the CRM record, the Slack alert. Check spam protection, booking embeds and any pricing calculators. A broken demo form on a B2B site is lost pipeline, and it is the bug nobody notices until sales asks where the leads went.

Launch day and the first two weeks

Launch early in the week, so the team is around to catch problems. Then, for two weeks:

• Check Search Console daily for indexing problems and crawl errors.
• Re-crawl the live site after a few days for broken links and missing redirects.
• Confirm conversion events and form submissions are still arriving.
• Ask your ten most important buyer questions in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google, and record where you appear, so you have a baseline for later.
• Give Core Web Vitals field data a few weeks to build up before judging it.

Launching with us

Every site we build ships with this list done. A website starts from $15k and a landing page from $10k, usually 2 to 3 weeks for a landing page and 1 to 3 months for a full site. For a raise or launch date, our Brand + Website + Launch Video package is $25k and goes live in 4 to 8 weeks, with an SEO-ready structure from day one. If you are still budgeting, our free website cost calculator shows what year one costs, and SEO and AEO work continues after launch if you want it.

DesignMe designs and builds websites for funded SaaS and AI companies, with SEO, AEO, analytics and performance checked before launch, not after. If your launch date is set and you want a second pair of eyes on the list, send us the staging link and we’ll reply within one business day:

designme.agency/intro