Everything feels ready until it isn't. The design looks sharp, the copy reads clean, and then someone opens the site on their phone and a button slides halfway off the screen, or a visitor spots a "lorem ipsum" you were sure you deleted three weeks ago. A pre-launch website audit is how you stop finding out about these things the hard way. Run one properly and you catch the broken links, the slow pages, and the small embarrassing slips while they're still cheap to fix and nobody else has seen them.
Here's the checklist I'd run before flipping the switch on any site.
Start with functionality
Cosmetics can wait. First, confirm the thing actually works. Click every navigation item and make sure it lands where it should. Submit your forms and check that the data shows up where you expect it to. If there's a checkout or a signup flow, walk it from start to finish the way a real person would, and don't skip the ugly paths: the declined card, the mistyped email, the back button pressed at the worst moment.
Broken links are the classic launch-day faceplant. A 404 on a CDN quietly takes out a hero image, and a dead link three pages deep is exactly the kind of thing your team stopped seeing months ago. This is where a tool like Steterly pulls its weight in a pre-launch website audit. It crawls every anchor on every page, follows redirect chains to the end, and tells you which page each broken link actually lives on, plus any images that are 404ing somewhere you'd never think to look.
Hunt down the slips your team stopped seeing
Stare at the same pages long enough and you go blind to them. A placeholder phone number here, a your@email.com that never got swapped out, a © 2021 still sitting in the footer. None of it breaks anything. All of it makes a brand-new site feel slightly unfinished, and visitors notice even when they can't say why.
This is tedious work, and tedious work is exactly what you want to hand off. Steterly runs an AI proofreader across every paragraph in nine languages, catches placeholder text in all its flavors (lorem ipsum, (555) 555-5555, TODO, "coming soon"), and checks the copyright year on every page instead of just the homepage. Brand names and product terms go into a custom dictionary so it quits flagging them.
Check performance and speed
People bail on slow sites, and search engines bury them. Measure load times on desktop and mobile both, and lean hardest on your image-heavy landing pages, since those are usually the first thing a new visitor sees. The usual suspects are predictable: images nobody compressed, scripts that block rendering, and a pile of third-party widgets each adding a little more weight.
A Core Web Vitals breakdown tells you where you really stand. If your Largest Contentful Paint is sitting at 3.2 seconds against a 2.5 target, far better to learn that now than after the launch traffic arrives. Every Steterly scan includes a PageSpeed Insights breakdown for mobile and desktop, so speed gets checked in the same pass as everything else rather than as an afterthought.
Audit your SEO foundations
A launch is the one moment your technical SEO is genuinely a blank slate, so start it clean. Give every page a unique title tag and meta description. Blank or missing ones slip through constantly. Keep the heading structure sane, one clear H1 per page, give images real alt text, and double-check that your robots.txt isn't quietly blocking the pages you actually want indexed. That last one tanks more launches than anyone likes to admit.
Steterly flags blank or missing meta titles and descriptions, duplicate or missing H1 tags, and images with no alt text, which covers most of the technical gaps that hold a fresh site back in search.
Verify accessibility
Accessibility is not a nice-to-have, and it's far cheaper to handle before launch than to retrofit after. Check color contrast, keyboard navigation, and screen-reader behavior. Make sure form fields carry proper labels and that nothing interactive is mouse-only.
An automated WCAG 2.1 Level AA scan clears out the bulk of common barriers: the empty <button></button> with no accessible name, unlabelled forms, broken ARIA roles. Steterly's accessibility module handles those HTML-level checks, though I'd treat any automated scanner as a strong first pass rather than the whole job. Some things still need a human and a keyboard.
Test across devices and browsers
Your site has to survive a phone, a tablet, and a desktop, across the browsers people actually use. A layout that's flawless in Chrome can fall apart in Safari, and a menu that's fine on desktop can be useless under a thumb. Check tap targets, font sizes, and anything that overflows its container on a narrow screen. Test on real hardware where you can, because a browser's responsive mode lies to you more often than you'd think.
Confirm analytics and security
Few things sting like launching, watching a wave of traffic roll in, and realizing none of it was tracked. Confirm your analytics fires on every page and that your conversion goals are wired up. Then run a last security pass: valid SSL, the whole site on HTTPS with no mixed-content warnings, everything updated, and a recent backup parked somewhere safe in case you need to roll back in a hurry.
Bring it together
A pre-launch website audit is really just a way to shrink the list of unknowns before you commit. Move through functionality, content slips, speed, SEO, accessibility, cross-device testing, analytics, and security, and you'll have caught the overwhelming majority of problems while they're still quiet and cheap.
Here's the thing about the mechanical half of that list though, the crawling for broken links, the hunt for typos and placeholders, the meta-tag and page-speed checks. Doing it by hand is slow, and it's the exact kind of work where tired eyes miss the obvious. Steterly does it in minutes. One scan turns up all eight finding types at once, on whatever you built with, whether that's WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, Squarespace, Wix, Framer, or a custom React or Vue stack. No plugins, no tracking scripts, no hit to your page speed.
And you can run your first scan free, right now, no credit card. Point Steterly at your site, get up to 50 pages checked for broken links, dead images, placeholders, speed, and missing meta tags, and see exactly what your visitors would have caught before they ever get the chance. It's the easiest final checkpoint you'll ever add to a launch, and it earns its keep the first time it stops a typo from going live on your homepage. Start your free scan and go live knowing you've looked under every rock.
Frequently asked questions
What is a pre-launch website audit?
It's a structured review of a website before it goes live, covering functionality, content quality, page speed, SEO, accessibility, and security. The goal is to catch problems like broken links, typos, and missing meta tags while they're still easy to fix and before any real visitors run into them.
How long does a pre-launch website audit take?
A manual audit of a small site takes a few hours; larger sites can stretch across a day or more. The repetitive technical checks (broken links, dead images, meta tags, placeholders, page speed) can be automated and finished in minutes, which leaves your time for the judgment calls that actually need a person.
What should I check before launching a website?
At a minimum: every link and form works, the site is fast on mobile and desktop, each page has a unique title and meta description, images have alt text, the copy is free of typos and placeholders, the site is accessible, analytics is firing, and SSL plus HTTPS are in place with a recent backup ready.
Can I automate a pre-launch website audit?
The mechanical parts, yes. Tools like Steterly crawl your rendered site and flag broken links, dead images, typos, placeholder text, missing meta tags, slow pages, and accessibility issues without any plugins or tracking scripts. Manual testing of complex user flows and real-device checks still benefit from a human.
Does Steterly work with my CMS or site builder?
Yes. Steterly scans the fully rendered frontend, so it's platform-agnostic. It works with WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, Squarespace, Wix, Framer, and custom React, Vue, or static HTML sites, with nothing to install and no impact on your page speed.