Launch checklist

Before you decide to finally launch your new website, it may be a good idea to go through the checklist below to ensure you have not missed anything important.

GDPR / DSGVO

User data privacy has become a hot topic in the past years. Before launching your website, we suggest that you double-check if it is GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliant. We have prepared the GDPR / DSGVO guide for you to make things easier.

Optimize your website

Page speed optimization is one of the most critical factors to make your website accessible and performant. It also affects the leads & sales conversion and the ranking position of your site in the search results. At this stage, we recommend that you follow our Optimization guide.

Final checklist

Just before you go live, make sure to check the last things needed to launch your website:

Create a user account with limited permissions for your customer

It may not be safe if your customer has administrator rights in Contao. Thus, we recommend creating a limited user account for your customer. Use the user groups to restrict access to certain parts inside Contao.

Force or remove the "www" subdomain

To avoid the duplicate content problem, you should decide on one domain for your website and force or remove the "www" subdomain. You can use this .htaccess snippet below:

# Force the "www." subdomain
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) https://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

### or ###

# Remove the "www." subdomain
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) https://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Force the secure HTTPS connection

Make sure to secure your website by enabling HTTPS protection. You can enable that in the website root settings or in the .htaccess file:

# Force the secure connection (SSL)
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

Generate a sitemap in the site structure

Become friendly to the web crawlers and enable the sitemap generation of your website. You can do that in the website root settings.

Add the 404/403 error pages

Do not forget to create the 404 page not found error page. You may also want to add the 403 page if you allow members to log in to your website.

Add Google Maps API key, if any

If you are using Google Maps on your website, do not forget to set the correct API key in the website root settings. You may also want to restrict your key to your domain name in the Google Cloud control panel.

Setup website analytics

Whether you plan to use Google Analytics, Matomo, or other analytics tools, ensure that you have installed it correctly on your website. You may also want to check if they are GDPR compliant.

Add favicons

To make your website recognizable in the browser tab and bookmarks, we suggest creating favicons. Our favorite tool is the RealFaviconGenerator.

Check W3C validation

Validate your website using W3C Validator. You should fix all errors and warnings that appear there.

Check if the e-mails are working

If you have any form on the website that sends an e-mail, double-check if the form is working correctly. You may want to set up the SMTP connection to ensure the e-mails are correctly sent.

Enable/disable search indexing

If you want your website to be searchable, then you're all set. However, if you don't plan to have any search module on your website, it might be better to disable the default search indexer. You can do that by editing the Contao configuration and rebuilding the cache (e.g., using Contao Manager) afterward:

# config/config.yaml
contao:
    search:
        default_indexer:
            enable: false

Check if the Contao version is up to date

Are you on the latest Contao version? It's always worth checking, as the update will fix some bugs or security vulnerabilities.