By Bilal Hashimi ·
Your new website is live. It looks good on your phone, the photos are sharp, and the phone number is clickable. Here is the question most contractors never ask until something goes wrong: what happens next?
A launch is the start of your website working for you, not the end of the project. Here is what should actually happen after your website launches — and what to expect from the person who built it.
Week one: the launch checklist nobody shows you
A good designer does not hand you the keys and disappear. In the first week after launch, there are things that need checking before the project is really done:
- Everything still works in the real world. Forms get tested end to end. The phone number dials. Quote requests actually land in your inbox instead of the spam folder.
- Google knows your site exists. Google Search Console gets set up so you can see how Google sees your site, and a sitemap gets submitted. Without this step, you are waiting on Google to find you by luck.
- Speed gets checked. A page that takes too long to load loses visitors before they ever see your work. A quick run through Google's PageSpeed Insights shows exactly what is slowing a page down — and most of it is fixable on day one.
- Analytics is running. You cannot know whether the site is working if nobody is measuring it. Basic visitor tracking should be installed from the start, with access in your name.
Ask your designer to walk you through this list before they call the project done. If they cannot show you it is done, it probably is not.
The first 90 days: watch, measure, adjust
New websites almost always need small adjustments in the first few months. Real visitors behave differently from everyone in a design review. Maybe nobody scrolls far enough to reach the reviews section. Maybe the contact form has one field too many and people bail halfway through.
This is normal. What matters is that someone is watching the numbers and making those fixes. Check in with your designer about a month after launch and ask what the numbers say: how many visitors, where they came from, and how many called or filled out the form. That conversation tells you more about your site's health than anything else.
If you want to read those numbers yourself, I wrote a longer walkthrough: How to Tell If Your Website Is Actually Working: A Contractor's Checklist (opens in a new tab).
Ongoing: updates, security, and backups
Websites need upkeep. The software underneath your site gets updated regularly, and skipping updates is how sites get hacked or break. Backups matter too — if something goes wrong, you want a clean copy of the site to restore from instead of rebuilding it.
Most designers offer some kind of care plan for this. The details vary, but the principle does not: someone should be responsible for keeping the site updated, backed up, and secure. Small-business care plans commonly run anywhere from about $50 to $200 a month depending on what is included. What you are really buying is not the updates themselves. It is knowing that when something breaks at 9 PM, someone fixes it.
One thing worth settling before launch day, not after: who owns what. Make sure the domain, the hosting account, and the analytics are registered in your name, even if your designer manages them day to day. I covered why that matters here: Who Owns Your Website After It's Built? Read This Before You Pay a Designer (opens in a new tab).
When things break (they will)
Something will eventually go wrong. A form stops sending. A page loads blank. An update breaks the layout. What separates a good designer from a bad one is what happens in that moment: do they respond, and how fast?
Before you hire anyone, ask directly: "If my site goes down, how quickly will you respond?" Then get the answer in writing. A designer who cannot answer that question has already answered it.
Red flags that the designer is gone for good
A few signs the post-launch relationship is not going to exist: you were never given logins to anything, the only contact is a form on their own site, small changes take weeks or cost a surprising amount, and nobody has mentioned analytics since launch day. If you recognize your situation in that list, it is worth having a conversation now — before something breaks — rather than scrambling later.
The bottom line
Launch day should feel like the beginning of something, not the end of a transaction. The right person checks the work, watches the numbers, keeps the site healthy, and answers when something breaks. If that is the arrangement being offered, you are in good shape. If it is not, now you know the questions to ask.