DEV Community

Cover image for 5 SEO Checks to Run Before Launching Your Website
Tech Webster
Tech Webster

Posted on

5 SEO Checks to Run Before Launching Your Website

#webdev #seo #beginners #showdev

Your website loads. The layout works on mobile. The forms submit correctly.

Before you announce the launch, there’s another check worth making: what does your production site tell search engines—and what happens when someone shares its URL?

A leftover indexing directive or a canonical pointing to staging can be easy to miss during visual testing.

I’m Ashirbad, CEO of TechWebster. We built SEO By TechWebster to make these checks easier. It’s a free tool that checks public URLs without requiring an account.

Whether you use an analyzer or inspect your pages manually, here are five checks to include in your launch process.

1. Check whether production pages allow indexing

A staging environment might intentionally include:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

That becomes a problem if it reaches a production page you want people to find through search.

Check both the page’s robots meta tag and the X-Robots-Tag response header for unintended indexing restrictions.

Also review robots.txt, but remember that crawling and indexing are different. Blocking a URL in robots.txt can prevent Google from reading its noindex directive; it does not reliably keep the URL out of search results. Google’s robots documentation explains how these controls interact.

To inspect the response headers from a normal GET request, run:

curl -sS -D - -o /dev/null https://yoursite.com
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Look for an X-Robots-Tag header. In your browser, view the page source and search for noindex; check the rendered HTML too if your app changes metadata with JavaScript.

Before launch: verify the settings on the deployed URL, including any rules added by your hosting platform. If you have access to the site’s Search Console property, use Google Search Console’s URL Inspection to inspect Google’s indexed information and run a live test.

2. Give each important page a useful title and description

Check for placeholder titles, missing descriptions, and metadata copied across unrelated pages.

Compare:

<title>Home</title>
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

With something more descriptive:

<title>Custom Web Development | Example Studio</title>
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

The second version helps someone understand the page before opening it.

Write a description that accurately summarizes that particular page, too. Your homepage, services page, and product page serve different purposes.

Google can generate different title links and snippets, so these fields are inputs rather than a guaranteed preview. Its developer SEO guide recommends descriptive titles and meta descriptions.

Before launch: inspect several important routes, rather than checking only the homepage.

3. Make sure canonical URLs point to the right pages

A canonical identifies your preferred URL when similar or duplicate versions exist.

For example:

<link
  rel="canonical"
  href="https://example.com/services/web-development"
/>
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Check for:

  • References to a staging domain.
  • HTTP URLs when production uses HTTPS.
  • Every page pointing to the homepage.
  • Multiple conflicting canonical tags.

The goal is to give search engines consistent information about your preferred URLs. Google’s JavaScript SEO guidance also covers canonical handling.

Before launch: open a few nested pages, view their source, and search for rel="canonical". Confirm each canonical is intentional.

4. Check the preview people will share

Launch day often means sharing a link through LinkedIn, messaging apps, and other social platforms.

Review your Open Graph and social-card metadata:

<meta property="og:title" content="Example Studio">
<meta
  property="og:description"
  content="Custom websites and applications for growing businesses."
>
<meta
  property="og:image"
  content="https://example.com/social-preview.jpg"
>
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Make sure the image URL is public, loads successfully, and points to the intended asset.

Before launch: test a real share preview with LinkedIn’s Post Inspector. Platforms may cache older metadata, so inspecting your HTML alone doesn’t confirm what someone will see.

5. Review discovery files and page structure

Finish with a few checks that are easy to overlook:

  • Does robots.txt allow access to the public sections you want crawled?
  • Does your sitemap contain the intended production URLs?
  • Do headings describe the content in a sensible order?
  • Do informative images have meaningful alternative text?
  • If you include JSON-LD, does it parse correctly and describe the visible content?

Not every page needs every type of structured data. Choose markup that actually applies.

Before launch: review warnings in context. A checklist score is useful for finding things to inspect; it isn’t a prediction of search rankings.

A repeatable launch workflow

My suggested process is:

  1. Deploy to the production URL.
  2. Check the homepage and key landing pages.
  3. Fix unintended indexing restrictions and incorrect metadata.
  4. Test social previews.
  5. Run the checks again after deploying fixes.

SEO By TechWebster brings metadata, social cards, discovery files, headings, image alt text, and JSON-LD checks into one report, with suggested fixes.

Use it as an initial review alongside browser testing and Google Search Console. A passing report doesn’t guarantee indexing or rankings.

What’s one SEO detail you always check before shipping a website?

Top comments (0)