---
title: Five free checks before a new site goes live
description: Five free tools we run on every launch, in order, to catch broken links, certificate gaps, leftover staging settings and slow pages before visitors do.
date: 2026-10-02
updated: 2026-10-02
tags: [friday roundup, tools, launch]
url: "https://drivenhost.com/blog/five-checks-before-launch"
author: DrivenHost
---

Most of the broken launches we see are not dramatic. The site loads, the owner is happy, and three weeks later someone notices that half the old URLs go nowhere, or that the whole thing is still telling Google to stay away. None of that needs a paid audit to find. We put sites live most weeks, and the same short list of free tools catches nearly all of it in under an hour. Here are the five we run, roughly in the order we run them.

## Crawl the whole site before a search engine does

The first thing we do on a staging or freshly launched site is crawl it with Screaming Frog's SEO Spider. It walks every internal link and hands back the things nobody notices by clicking around: 404s, redirect chains that bounce twice before landing, pages with no title, images with no alt text, links still pointing at the old domain. The free version limits how many URLs it will crawl, which is plenty for the small-business sites we mostly deal with. If the crawl shows a pile of redirects feeding into other redirects, that is worth fixing before launch rather than after, and we wrote about [why those chains matter](/blog/redirects-done-right) earlier in the year.

## Test the certificate, not just the padlock

A green padlock in your own browser proves very little. Chrome on a desktop will often paper over a missing intermediate certificate because it already cached the issuer, while an Android phone or an older mail client on the same site fails outright. The Qualys SSL Labs server test loads the full chain the way a stranger's device would and tells you exactly what is missing. Free Let's Encrypt certificates on our [shared hosting](/hosting) are issued and renewed by cPanel so the chain is handled for you, but if a site is sitting behind a proxy or using a certificate someone installed by hand, run the test. Our post on [what a certificate actually proves](/blog/ssl-beyond-padlock) covers the rest.

## Put the HTML through the W3C checker

The W3C's Nu HTML Checker is unglamorous and still useful. We are not chasing a clean report, because almost no real theme produces one. We are looking for the handful of errors that break things in practice: an unclosed div that swallows the footer on mobile, duplicate element IDs that stop a script from finding the right form, stray tags left behind when someone edited a page in the visual editor and then switched to code view. Two minutes of reading, and you usually know whether a layout problem is the theme or the content.

## Load it cold in PageSpeed Insights

The useful moment to run PageSpeed Insights is right after launch, before any caching plugin has warmed up and before anyone has had a chance to explain away the numbers. We mostly ignore the headline score and read the diagnostics underneath it. Nine times out of ten the list is the same: a hero image exported at four times the size it displays at, a slider loading fonts nobody uses, a tag manager container inherited from a site redesign two agencies ago. Those are content decisions, not server problems, and they are far cheaper to fix on launch day than six months in. We have written before about what those speed numbers actually mean, and the short version is that the diagnostics are the part worth acting on.

## Ask Search Console what it can see

Last, we verify the domain in Google Search Console and run URL Inspection on the home page plus one deep page. This is the check that catches the launch-day classic: a `noindex` tag still switched on from the staging build, a `robots.txt` that was blocking crawlers while the site was being built, or a canonical tag on every page pointing at the staging subdomain. Search Console shows you the page as Google fetched it, which is the only view that settles the argument. It also means that if indexing does go sideways later, you have history to look at instead of guesswork.

None of this replaces a careful build, and none of it takes long. A crawl, a certificate test, a validator pass, one cold speed run and one look through Google's eyes will catch the great majority of launch problems while they are still cheap. If you are putting a site live with us this month and want a second set of eyes on it before you flip the DNS, [open a ticket with our support team](/support) and tell us the staging URL.