Shopify store launch checklist: what to verify before you go live

A Shopify launch checklist is worth having because launch failures are boringly predictable: a payment method that was never tested with a real card, notification emails still saying "My Store", a theme that breaks on a phone, and analytics that started collecting data three weeks late. None of it is hard. It just has to be written down, because on launch day nobody remembers all of it.

Here is the list I work through, in order.

Before launch — commerce

1. Place a real order with a real card, on the live payment gateway, on a phone. Then refund it. If you haven't done this, you have not tested checkout.
2. Test every payment method you've enabled, including the ones you think nobody uses.
3. Test every shipping rate by putting a cart together that hits each zone and each threshold. Free-shipping thresholds are a common source of "why did that cost £0".
4. Check tax appears correctly on the order for each region you sell to — see tax setup.
5. Check inventory decrements correctly, and that out-of-stock behaviour is what you want.
6. Check the discount codes you plan to launch with actually apply, including any exclusions.

Before launch — content

1. Every notification email is edited, branded and reads in your voice. There are roughly twenty; the order confirmation and shipping confirmation are read by every single customer.
2. Policy pages exist and are yours — terms, refunds, privacy, shipping. Not copied from a competitor.
3. Contact details are real and the contact form goes somewhere a person reads.
4. Placeholder text is gone. Search the theme for "Lorem", "My Store" and the theme author's demo copy.
5. 404 page is styled and links somewhere useful.
6. Product data spot-check — take ten random products and verify title, description, images, price, variants, weight and SEO fields.

Before launch — technical

1. Every template on a phone, on a throttled connection. Home, collection, product, cart, checkout, search, blog, a policy page.
2. Core Web Vitals measured on the key templates so you have a baseline — the speed audit covers what to look at.
3. Images have width and height so the layout doesn't jump.
4. Search works and returns sensible results for the three terms customers will actually type.
5. Apps audited — uninstall anything you trialled and didn't keep, and check for leftover scripts.
6. Staff accounts set up with the permissions each person needs, and your own account secured — see staff accounts and permissions.
7. Theme backed up. Download a copy of the live theme before launch day, not after something breaks.

Before launch — SEO and analytics

1. Analytics installed and firing. Confirm a test purchase appears as a conversion, not just a pageview.
2. Search Console verified and the sitemap submitted.
3. Page titles and meta descriptions written for the homepage, every collection and your top products.
4. If this is a replatform, the redirects are loaded and tested — this is the single highest-stakes item on the list. Every old URL must return one 301 to a live page with no chain. Migrating without losing SEO covers the whole process.
5. Password page removed — and only at the moment you actually launch.
6. robots.txt and indexing left at Shopify's defaults unless you have a specific reason.

Launch

1. Point the domain — see domain and DNS setup. Do it outside peak hours.
2. Verify HTTPS on the apex and the www variant, and that one redirects to the other.
3. Place one more real order on the live domain.
4. Walk the site as a customer on your own phone, on mobile data, not office wifi.

The week after

1. Watch Search Console for crawl errors daily for the first fortnight.
2. Watch the analytics funnel — where people drop out in the first week tells you more than any pre-launch opinion did.
3. Read the support inbox. The first fifty customer emails are the best usability report you will ever get, and free.
4. Re-measure speed with field data once real traffic arrives. Lab data lies about real-world performance.

The one item on this list people skip is placing a real order with a real card. It is also the only one that has ever cost a client an entire launch day.

If a launch is being run by someone else, the questions to ask them include what their launch process is. A developer who can't describe one has not done many.