The Pre-Launch Checklist Every Non-Technical Founder Needs Before Going Live

Most AI-built sites that fail in production were never properly tested before launch. Not because the founders were careless. Because nobody gave them a clear list of what to check that does not require reading error logs or opening developer tools.

This is that list. Eight things. Each one is something you can verify yourself with no technical knowledge. The whole checklist takes 45 minutes the first time and about 20 minutes after you have done it once. It is the difference between a launch you are proud of and three days of customer service emails explaining why something did not work.

Do this on your phone, not your desktop. Your phone is where most of your visitors will arrive. A site that works perfectly on a MacBook and breaks on an iPhone is a broken site.

1. Complete a real purchase from start to finish

If you have a store, this is the most important item on the list. Go through the entire purchase flow yourself. Add a product to your cart. Go to checkout. Use a test card (Stripe's test card number is 4242 4242 4242 4242 with any future expiry date and any CVC). Complete the purchase. Then check your inbox for a confirmation email.

If the confirmation email does not arrive within two minutes, your email integration is not working. This is a live problem. Fix it before you tell anyone the store is open.

2. Submit every form on the site

Contact forms, enquiry forms, booking forms, newsletter signups. Submit each one with real information. Then verify the submission arrived where it was supposed to go. Check your email for a notification. Check your admin panel for a new entry. If you cannot find evidence the submission was received, the form is broken.

Forms that accept input and show a success message but deliver nothing to you are one of the most common failures in AI-built sites. The customer thinks they reached you. You never hear from them.

3. Create a customer account, log out, and log back in

Use an email address you have not used before on this site. Create an account. Log out. Log back in. Verify it works. Then try your password reset flow all the way through: request a reset, receive the email, click the link, set a new password, log in with the new password.

Authentication failures are subtle. The signup might work and the login might fail for accounts created a certain way. The password reset link might arrive but lead to an expired page. You find these by doing them, not by looking at the site.

4. Click every button on every page

Go through the site page by page and tap every button. Navigation links, CTA buttons, product buttons, filter buttons, pagination. If a button does not do something visible when you tap it, it may not be working. Note anything that seems unresponsive and investigate before launch.

5. Check every page loads without errors

Navigate to every page in your site directly. Do not just click through from the homepage. Type the URLs directly or find them in your site navigation and open each one. A page that loads fine when you arrive from the homepage can throw an error when someone navigates to it directly from Google.

Also check what happens when someone goes to a page that does not exist. Type your domain followed by /something-random. You should see a proper 404 page, not a blank screen or a technical error.

6. Test on a real mobile network, not your wifi

Turn off your wifi and use mobile data. Walk around a bit if you can. Test the site on a real network connection with real latency. Pages that load in under a second on your home wifi can take five seconds on mobile data and time out on slower connections. If images are taking too long to load on mobile data, they need to be compressed before you launch.

7. Check all your confirmation emails read correctly

After your test purchase and form submissions, open the confirmation emails you received. Read them. Check that the order details are correct, that any download links work, that the reply-to address is yours and not a placeholder, and that nothing looks broken or templated in a way you did not intend.

Emails with broken links or placeholder text go out to every customer until you catch and fix them. Catching them in your own test takes two minutes.

8. Check your site loads on a different browser

If you tested on Safari, open Chrome and run through the site again. If you tested on Chrome, try Firefox. Different browsers render things slightly differently and handle certain interactions differently. A checkout that works in Chrome and fails in Safari is something you want to know before your customers discover it.

The version of this checklist that runs automatically

Everything on this list is something a browser-based testing agent can run automatically. That is exactly what CodePup does before your site is delivered. A testing agent clicks every button, submits every form, completes every purchase flow, creates and logs in to a test account, and checks email delivery. If anything fails, the bug-fix agent repairs it before you see the result.

You still get the checklist above for free as a founder. Running it yourself before sharing the link is never a bad idea. But the catastrophic failures, the ones that break checkout and kill conversions before you even know the site is live, those have already been caught and fixed before the site reaches you.

If you are starting a new site or store and you want to skip the 45-minute manual test because it was already done for you, build with CodePup. The checklist runs before delivery.