Online Business Launch Checklist: Every Step Before You Go Live

Use this checklist to make sure nothing critical is missing before you announce your business or product publicly. It's organized in the order most items actually need to happen.

1. Domain and basic setup

• Register a domain name that's short, easy to spell, and matches your business name if possible.
• Decide where your main pages will live - a full website, a funnel-tool-hosted page, or both.
• Set up a professional email address on your own domain rather than a generic free email provider, for credibility.

2. Your core funnel

• Build your opt-in page and confirm the lead magnet delivers correctly end to end.
• Build your core offer's sales page, including social proof if you have any (even early testimonials from friends or beta users count).
• Test the entire flow yourself, from landing on the opt-in page through to receiving the delivery email, on both desktop and mobile.

3. Payment processing

• Connect a payment processor to your order form and run a real test transaction if the platform supports test mode.
• Confirm you understand payout timing and fees - don't assume you'll receive funds instantly.
• Decide your refund policy in advance and make sure it's clearly stated before launch, not improvised after your first refund request.

4. Email list infrastructure

• Confirm your welcome sequence is live and triggers correctly on opt-in.
• Set up your sending domain authentication (SPF/DKIM) if your platform requires manual setup, to protect deliverability from day one.
• Add an easy, clearly visible unsubscribe option - required in most jurisdictions and good practice regardless.

5. Legal and trust pages

• Publish a privacy policy describing what data you collect and how it's used.
• Publish terms of service if you're selling a product or service.
• Publish an affiliate disclosure page if you promote any affiliate offers anywhere on your site.
• Make sure all of the above are linked from your site's footer, not just floating unlinked pages.

6. Traffic plan

• Identify the one or two channels (not five or six) you'll focus on first - trying to be everywhere at once at launch usually means doing all of it poorly.
• Prepare your first week of content or outreach in advance, so launch day isn't the first time you're creating anything.
• Decide how you'll measure early success (opt-in rate, first sales, click-through rate) so you know whether to adjust quickly.

7. Final pre-launch check

• Click every link on every page yourself, including on mobile.
• Make a real test purchase if at all possible, using an actual payment method.
• Ask one other person unfamiliar with the funnel to go through the entire flow and flag anything confusing.

None of these steps need to be perfect before launch - but each one that's skipped entirely tends to surface as an avoidable problem within the first week. See our sales funnel guide and step-by-step tutorial for more detail on the funnel-building steps above.