Your website is live. Here is what to do in the first week.

A day-by-day checklist for the week after launch: get found on Google, make sure forms and email work, set up measurement and protect what you built.

Launching a website feels like the finish line. It is closer to the start. The site exists, but Google may not know about it yet, the contact form has never received a real message, and nobody has checked whether the backups work. The first week is when those gaps are cheapest to close.

Here is a simple plan, one focus a day. None of it needs a developer, and each step takes less than an hour.

Day 1: check it like a stranger

• Open every page on your phone and on a computer. Look for broken links, placeholder text and images that do not load.
• Make sure the address bar shows the padlock on every page, and that both www and the plain domain go to the same place.
• Ask someone who has never seen the site to find your phone number and send you a message. Watch where they get stuck.

Day 2: make sure messages reach you

• Submit every form on the site and confirm each message arrives, including in your spam folder. Our contact form guide covers the usual fixes.
• Use an email address at your own domain for the site and for replies. Business email from Serverlys starts at $5.95/mo for two mailboxes, plus a one-time $2.95 setup.
• Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC so your messages are trusted. See our guide to email authentication.

Day 3: tell Google you exist

• Add your site to Google Search Console and verify it. This is free and shows you how Google sees your site.
• Submit your sitemap (often at /sitemap.xml) in Search Console, and request indexing for your home page.
• If you serve customers locally, create or update your Google Business Profile with the same name, phone number and website address as the site. Our local SEO guide explains why consistency matters.

Day 4: start measuring

• Install analytics so you can see how many people visit and where they come from. Our Google Analytics 4 guide walks through it.
• Decide what a successful visit looks like for you (a form sent, a call, a booking) and track that, not just page views.
• If you collect data from visitors in regions with privacy laws, add a cookie notice that matches what you actually use. See our note on GDPR compliance.

Day 5: check your speed

Run your home page and your most important service page through PageSpeed Insights on mobile. If a page is slow, the usual causes on a new site are oversized images and embeds added at the last minute. Our guides to image optimisation and the hidden weight of scripts and embeds cover the fixes.

Day 6: protect what you built

• Confirm backups are running, and find out how to restore one. Every Serverlys hosting plan includes free daily backups.
• Turn on two-factor authentication for your hosting, your domain registrar and your website admin.
• Write down where everything lives: registrar, hosting, email, analytics, and which email address each account uses. Our article on who has access to your website has a template for this.
• Check your domain is on auto-renew with a valid card. See how to make sure your domain belongs to you.

Day 7: tell people, and make it easy to reply

• Add the website to your email signature, social profiles, invoices and printed materials.
• Tell existing customers. They are the people most likely to visit, share and leave a review.
• Think about what happens when someone visits at 10pm with a question. A chat assistant like ConvoAI can answer from your own information and pass the conversation to you in the morning, and it has a free plan to try it.

If you have not launched yet

Start with how much a website costs and how much hosting you actually need. Our plans start at $7.95/mo, renewing at $12.62/mo, with SSL, daily backups and free migration included; compare them here. And if you would rather have the site built for you, our website design team builds it, hosts it and wires in analytics from day one.