Before design
- Export every indexable URL and record its purpose.
- Review Search Console landing pages, queries and links where available.
- Identify pages that receive enquiries or support important customer journeys.
- Record current titles, descriptions, canonicals, headings and structured data.
- Separate content problems from visual problems.
Before development
- Approve the new URL map and one-to-one redirects.
- Keep useful copy unless there is an evidence-based reason to change it.
- Make navigation and internal links crawlable without script-only controls.
- Plan canonical URLs, sitemap inclusion and robots rules.
- Keep staging environments blocked from indexing.
Before launch
- Crawl the preview for broken links, missing titles and unintended noindex rules.
- Verify mobile layouts, forms, analytics and consent behaviour.
- Create a dated backup and an explicit rollback path.
- Prepare the redirect and deployment files before changing DNS or production content.
After launch
- Read back priority pages from the public domain over HTTPS.
- Test old URLs and confirm their final destinations.
- Validate robots.txt, sitemap.xml and canonical tags.
- Submit the sitemap and monitor coverage and query changes.
- Keep dated observations; do not treat one crawl or click as proof of success.