Launch-Day SEO Checklist With Free Browser Tools

A new site needs about a dozen things in place before launch day if you want it to show up properly in search results and look right when people share it: a title and description that fit, an Open Graph image, a favicon set, structured data, a robots.txt that does not block you, a privacy policy, tagged launch links, light images, readable contrast, and a sitemap submitted to Google and Bing. Every step below can be done with a free tool in your browser, most of them from the toolbox on this site, with no account and nothing uploaded. Work through it top to bottom the day before you ship.

This is a checklist, not a tour: for how each tool works, see the roundup of free developer tools.

The checklist at a glance

Step	Free tool	Done when
Title and meta tags	Meta tag generator	Title and description fit the preview without an ellipsis
Open Graph image	OG image generator	Every key page has a 1200×630 card at an absolute URL
Favicon and app icon	Favicon, app icon	`.ico`, PNG set and manifest are linked from `<head>`
Structured data	JSON-LD generator	Each template has a block that passes validate mode
robots.txt	robots.txt generator	No warnings, sitemap line present
Privacy policy	Privacy policy generator	Policy is live at a public URL and linked in the footer
Launch links	UTM builder	One tagged link per channel, all lowercase
Image weight	Image converter, metadata remover	Large images resized, re-encoded, stripped of EXIF
Contrast	Contrast checker	Body text, buttons and form borders pass AA
Sitemap in Google	Google Search Console	Sitemaps report shows Success
Bing and IndexNow	Bing Webmaster Tools, IndexNow	Site verified, sitemap imported, key file live

1. Title and meta tags

Write one title and one description per page, then paste each pair into the meta tag generator. It measures your text in pixels, the way Google truncates it, and draws a search-result preview, so you can see whether the cut lands mid-word. Fix anything that ends in an ellipsis. It also flags a canonical or an og:image that is not an absolute URL, which is the mistake that makes a share card silently disappear.

Done means every key page and template has a unique title, a description that uses the space, and an https canonical. Compare the tool's <head> output against what your framework actually renders.

2. Open Graph image

The first time most people see your site is a link in Slack, LinkedIn, or a launch thread, and without an OG image that link is a grey box. The OG image generator draws a 1200×630 PNG from a title, a description, your site name, and an optional logo. Long titles shrink to fit before they are cut, and you are told if one had to be.

Host the file, then point og:image and twitter:image at its absolute URL. If a platform keeps showing an old card after you change it, that is caching: Facebook's Sharing Debugger and LinkedIn's Post Inspector both let you re-scrape.

3. Favicon and app icon

A missing favicon makes a new site look unfinished in a row of browser tabs and in bookmarks. The favicon generator takes a PNG, an SVG, or two letters and gives you the 16, 32, 48, 180, 192 and 512 pixel PNGs, a multi-size favicon.ico, a web app manifest, and the link tags. Download the zip, drop the files in your public folder, and paste the tags.

If you are launching a mobile app alongside the site, run the same artwork through the app icon generator. From one 1024 pixel image it writes an Xcode asset catalog, the Android mipmap launchers plus the 512 pixel Play Store icon, and Expo's icon.png and adaptive-icon.png. It flattens transparency onto a background color because the App Store rejects a 1024 icon with an alpha channel. If you have no app, skip it.

4. Structured data

Structured data does not make a page rank, but it is what makes a page eligible for rich results, and it is easy to get almost right. The JSON-LD generator builds Article, FAQPage, Product, Organization and BreadcrumbList markup from a form, with nested objects where schema.org expects them. For a launch, the useful minimum is an Organization block on the home page and Article or Product blocks on the templates that need them.

If your framework already emits JSON-LD, paste it into validate mode to check parsing, context, type and required properties.

5. robots.txt

The classic launch-day accident is shipping staging's Disallow: / to production. Open the robots.txt generator, start from the allow-everything preset (or the one that blocks common AI crawlers while staying open to search engines), and add your sitemap URL. It warns when a wildcard group disallows everything, when the sitemap is not an absolute URL, or when there is no sitemap at all.

After deploy, load /robots.txt on the live domain and read it.

6. Privacy policy

If your site has analytics, sign-up, or a newsletter form, it needs a privacy policy, and a policy copied from another product describes someone else's data. The privacy policy generator builds one from what you tick: analytics (with the SDK names you list), account sign-in, purchases, push notifications, AI features and so on, with optional GDPR, California and children's sections. Pick the web platform and it outputs Markdown, plus terms of use if you sell anything.

It is a starting template, not legal advice. Read every section, fix whatever does not match what your site actually does, publish it at a permanent URL, and link it from the footer.

7. UTM links for launch posts

On launch day you will post the same URL to several places, and without tagging they all blur into "direct" or "referral" in your analytics. Build one link per channel in the UTM builder: for example utm_source=producthunt, utm_medium=launch, utm_campaign=launch-2026-10. It keeps any existing query string and fragment, encodes values properly, and warns about capitals and spaces, because ProductHunt and producthunt become two rows in most reports.

Posting to Product Hunt and Hacker News? Decide the source values once and reuse them. Tag links in your own posts and emails, but give directories your clean canonical URL.

8. Image weight

The largest file on a new landing page is usually a hero screenshot exported at full resolution. Run those through the image converter: set a max width close to the size the image is actually displayed at, choose WebP or AVIF, and it shows the byte savings per file. It never upscales, and it tells you when a converted file came out larger, which happens with small or already-optimized images.

For images you want to keep exactly as they are, such as product photos or a team photo, use the image metadata remover instead. It cuts EXIF, GPS, XMP and similar blocks out of JPEG, PNG and WebP files without re-encoding them, so the pixels are identical, and it shows you what each file carried first. A phone photo on an About page can otherwise publish the coordinates of where it was taken.

9. Contrast

Low-contrast gray text is common on launch pages and fails accessibility. Check your body text, muted text, button labels, and form field borders in the contrast checker. It reports the ratio against all five WCAG 2 thresholds, and when a pair fails it suggests the nearest passing color by changing lightness only, so your brand color stays recognizable. Check the dark theme too. This covers color only, not a full accessibility audit.

Once the site is live

The last two steps need the real domain, so do them right after deploy. The instructions below were checked on October 18, 2026 against Google's, Bing's and IndexNow's own help pages.

Submit your sitemap in Google Search Console

Add your site as a property in Google Search Console and verify ownership. Submitting a sitemap needs owner permission.
Open your sitemap URL in a browser and check it loads. If you want to be sure Googlebot can fetch it, run a live test in the URL Inspection tool.
Go to the Sitemaps report, paste the sitemap URL into Add a new sitemap, and click Submit.
Wait for the status to read Success. If it does not, click the row for the error.

Two things to know. A sitemap is tied to one property, so http://, https:// and www. versions are tracked separately; submit it under the version you actually serve. And submission is a hint, not a promise: Google says there is no guarantee every URL in a sitemap will be crawled or indexed. Google also announced in 2023 that its old sitemap "ping" URL was going away, so the Sitemaps report and the Sitemap: line in robots.txt are the routes that remain.

Add Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow

In Bing Webmaster Tools, the quickest route is Import from the My Sites page: sign in with Google, allow access, and pick your site. Imported sites come across verified, with their sitemaps attached, so there is no second verification step.

IndexNow is a protocol for telling participating search engines that a URL was added or changed. Setup is three steps:

Generate a key of 8 to 128 characters (letters, digits and dashes).
Host it as a UTF-8 text file named {your-key}.txt at the root of your site, containing the key.
Submit URLs: a single URL with a GET request to an engine's /indexnow endpoint, or up to 10,000 at once as a JSON POST.

A URL submitted to one participating engine is shared with the others. Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam.cz and Yep are among them; Google is not. Many hosts and plugins already do this for you: Bing's setup page lists Cloudflare's Crawler Hints and WordPress plugins including Yoast and Rank Math. Submit only URLs whose content actually changed, and remember that, as with sitemaps, a submission does not guarantee indexing.

FAQ

What should I check for SEO before launching a website?

At minimum: unique titles and descriptions, a canonical on each page, an Open Graph image, a favicon, a robots.txt that allows crawling and lists your sitemap, and a sitemap submitted in Google Search Console. Structured data, image weight and contrast are next.

How long does it take Google to index a new site?

There is no fixed time. Google usually fetches a submitted sitemap quickly, but crawling the URLs in it can take longer and depends on the site. Submitting a sitemap helps discovery; it does not guarantee indexing.

Does Google support IndexNow?

No. Google is not among the participating search engines listed on indexnow.org. For Google, use the Sitemaps report in Search Console and the Sitemap: line in robots.txt.

Do I need a privacy policy if my site only has analytics?

Generally yes, because analytics tools collect data about visitors, and laws like the GDPR can apply wherever your visitors are. A generated policy is a starting point; check it against what your site really collects.

What size should an OG image be?

1200×630 pixels. That ratio works for Open Graph and X's large summary card, so one file covers the major platforms. Use an absolute https URL in the meta tag.

Every browser tool in this checklist lives in the toolbox, free and with nothing uploaded. For launch directories to post to once the site is ready, see where to launch your side project.