You build the site, deploy it, it loads fast, looks good, works on mobile. Done, right?
Probably not. There's a bunch of stuff that's easy to forget because it doesn't break anything visibly. Your site works fine but behind the scenes things aren't set up right and you won't notice until it matters.
Here are six things I kept seeing get missed:
Your emails might not arrive.
You set up a contact form, maybe a transactional email flow. But if SPF, DKIM, and DMARC aren't configured properly on your domain, those emails land in spam. Your users never see them. You never get the inquiry. Nobody complains because they don't know they missed anything.
You're probably breaking privacy laws somewhere.
No cookie consent banner, or one that doesn't actually block scripts before consent. Missing privacy policy. No SSL on parts of the site. If you have visitors from the EU, that's a legal problem. Most devs don't think about this because it's not a technical issue, it's a compliance one.
Google might not be indexing all your pages.
Missing sitemap, broken robots.txt rules, no meta tags on key pages. Your site is live but Google doesn't know half of it exists. You can check Search Console manually, but most people set it up once and never look again.
AI tools can't find you.
This is a newer one. LLMs and AI search tools are starting to recommend businesses and tools. If your site has no structured data, no schema markup, and no llms.txt, you're invisible to that whole layer. It's not critical today, but it's heading that way fast.
Your analytics aren't tracking what you think.
Tag installed, dashboard looks fine. But are events actually firing? Is the consent banner blocking the script before the user opts in? Are you tracking the pages that matter or just pageviews on your homepage? Broken analytics is worse than no analytics because you're making decisions on bad data.
Your Open Graph tags are wrong or missing.
Someone shares your site on Slack, Twitter, LinkedIn. What shows up? If your OG tags aren't set, it's a blank preview or a random snippet of text. First impression gone.
None of this shows up as an error. Your site loads, everything looks fine. But you're leaking value in ways you can't see from the browser.
I built a free tool called GradeMyWeb that checks all of this at once. You put in your URL, it runs 27 checks across email delivery, legal, analytics, search, AI readiness, and site quality, and gives you one letter grade. Takes 60 seconds, no signup.
Try it: https://grademyweb.com
Curious what other things you all commonly see get missed on launch. What's on your checklist that most people forget?
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