Pre-go-live checklist

Purpose: Everything verified before a new site/section serves production traffic — the night-before list.

Audience	Why it matters to you
Tech leads	Owners of the list
All engineers	Contributors of evidence

Content & functional

[ ] Production content complete and published; no lorem/placeholder or dev-only pages activated
[ ] All redirects (legacy URLs) configured and spot-tested; 404 page branded and cached
[ ] Search/SEO: sitemap.xml served, robots.txt correct (staging blocked, prod open), canonical tags, metadata
[ ] Analytics/consent firing correctly on prod IDs only

[ ] Latest Service Pack + security hotfixes applied (patching)
[ ] Security checklist passed incl. default-credential and dispatcher checks (security overview)
[ ] Dispatcher: deny-by-default verified from OUTSIDE (curl the forbidden paths through the CDN)
[ ] TLS chain valid, HSTS decided, headers verified externally
[ ] Maintenance tasks scheduled and confirmed running (revision GC, purges — maintenance)

[ ] Monitoring green: health checks wired into LB, alert routes tested (page someone on purpose once)
[ ] Load test at expected peak ×2 passed with cache hit ratio at target (load testing)
[ ] Backup completed post-content-load; restore rehearsed on this dataset (backup & restore)
[ ] Rollback plan written for this release specifically (rollback strategy)
[ ] Runbook current: contacts, escalation, known-issues, cache flush procedure
[ ] Launch-day plan: who watches dashboards, who can flush caches, who talks to the business