Launch day is not the end of a digital project. It is the beginning of a different kind of work. The organizations that treat launch as a finish line are the ones that call us six months later wondering why the site is not performing.
What happens after launch
In the first thirty days after a site goes live: search engines need to crawl and index the new content, analytics need to be verified, redirects from old URLs need to be confirmed, and the team maintaining the site needs to be trained.
The redirect audit
If URLs have changed — which they almost always do in a rebuild — the redirect audit is critical. Every old URL that receives traffic needs to redirect to the appropriate new URL. Missing redirects mean lost search equity. The redirect audit should be done before launch, not after.
The maintenance plan
Every site needs a maintenance plan: who updates content, who handles security updates, who monitors performance, and what the process is for requesting changes. Without a maintenance plan, sites degrade over time.