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The 7-day website checklist.
Websites stall for months for one reason: nobody decided what has to happen on which day, so everything waits on everything. This is the actual day-by-day checklist we run on client builds. Steal it — or hand it to whoever builds your next site and hold them to it.
Before day one: the two decisions that unblock everything
- One decision-maker. Feedback from a committee adds a week per round. Pick the person whose yes means yes.
- A fixed scope in writing. Page list, launch date, price. Anything new that comes up mid-build goes on the v2 list, not into the timeline.
Decide who the site is for and what it must make happen
- One working session: audience, top three customer questions, the single action the site should drive (call, booking, visit).
- Write the conversion model down: where leads come from today, where the site fits.
- Sign-off #1: strategy on one page. No pixels before this.
Lock the look before designing pages
- Type, color, imagery direction, and logo treatment presented as real options — not adjectives on a slide.
- Kill stock-photo clichés now (handshakes, headsets, skylines). Real photos or purposeful illustration.
- Sign-off #2: one direction, in writing. Revisions after this cost days.
Map every page before building any
- Page list with the job of each page and the keyword it targets — pages without a job get cut.
- Every page ends in a next step. No dead ends.
- If replacing an old site: redirect map for every URL that has traffic or links.
Build the real thing, not a mockup
- Design and copy written together — headlines are design. Draft copy in the real layout, not a Word doc.
- Lead capture wired now, not bolted on: forms or AI assistant, connected to wherever your leads actually live, with automated follow-up.
- Sign-off #3: review in a live preview link on your own phone — not a PDF.
The unglamorous day that separates pros from amateurs
- Every page on mobile, tablet, desktop; every form submitted for real; every link clicked.
- Speed pass: compressed images, no render-blocking junk, sub-3-second loads on a phone connection.
- Accessibility pass: contrast, keyboard navigation, alt text (WCAG 2.1 AA).
- Search foundation: titles, descriptions, headings, schema markup, sitemap — plus structured content AI assistants can cite, so you show up in answers as well as rankings.
- Test the lead alarm: submit a lead, confirm a human gets notified and follow-up fires.
Go live like it's routine — because it should be
- DNS swap in the morning, never on a Friday afternoon.
- Confirm forms, chat, and analytics on the live domain (staging tests don't count).
- Submit the sitemap; verify redirects; watch traffic for the first 48 hours.
- Handoff doc: where everything lives, how to change what, who owns the domain. You should own all of it — site, code, domain.
Why builds miss this schedule
Almost never for technical reasons. Builds stall on unmade decisions, mid-build scope additions, and content that "will be ready next week" for six weeks. The checklist works because the three sign-offs force decisions on a clock — and because copy is drafted for you rather than awaited from you.
Reality check: seven days assumes the builder does strategy, design, copy, and development in parallel with senior people. If your vendor quotes twelve weeks for the same scope, this checklist is the difference — decisions on a schedule, work in parallel, and no waiting on a content folder that never arrives.
Want this done for you
by next week?
Everything in this guide ships standard on every site we build — designed, written, and live in 7 days at a fixed price.