The Pre-Launch Site Audit Checklist

I audited our own company website. Every structured-data block, on all 151 pages, was invalid. Not missing. Invalid, which is worse, because it looks fine in the source and fine in the browser.

The cause was one character. The JSON-LD context key starts with an @, and the template engine read that @ as one of its own directives and compiled it away. The audit tool reported it as "JSON-LD: 0%", which reads like the tag is absent rather than broken, so it sat there for months.

That is the theme of this checklist. Every item in it is something that passes a visual check, passes a code review, and still costs you traffic.

What's inside

• Validating schema on the rendered page instead of the template, and why "0%" and "broken" look identical in a dashboard
• Checking canonicals across a full crawl rather than the handful of pages a sampling tool picks
• Measuring rendered title and meta description length, including the site-wide suffix that truncates every page at once
• Diffing your sitemap against what is actually indexable
• Finding the leftover staging noindex, in both the meta tag and the response header
• Reading your HSTS header for the subdomains you did not mean to publish
• Collapsing host, protocol and trailing-slash variants down to one canonical form
• Soft 404s, redirect chains, and broken internal links
• Confirming the og:image exists, is absolute, and returns 200
• Analytics that pass code review and never fire in production
• Mixed content, hreflang, and the re-run after deploy that catches everything the edge changed
• A one-page 16-point list you can print and work through before launch

Who it's for

Anyone shipping a website: developers, agencies, and founders about to launch. No SEO background needed. Every check explains why it hides and gives you the command or tool that proves it either way.

Get the PDF

Drop your name and email above and the checklist is yours. It is a clean, printable PDF. Run it on the live host after deploy, not on staging before it.