This is the whole checklist we run. Not a summary of it, not a teaser — the same 40 checks, with what each one is for and how to fix it. Work through it yourself and you will not need us.
The domain resolves correctly and consistently, worldwide.
If the name does not point anywhere, nobody reaches the site at all. This is the failure people describe as "the domain is not working".
Add an A record pointing at your host, or a CNAME pointing at your platform. New records can take up to 48 hours to spread.
People type both. If only one resolves, half your visitors land on an error and assume you are closed.
Create a record for whichever form is missing and redirect it to the other.
When one resolver knows the domain and another does not, the site works for you and not for your customers. This is the single most confusing failure to diagnose alone.
Wait for the TTL to expire. If it persists past 48 hours, look for conflicting records at your DNS provider.
The DNS standard does not allow it. Some providers paper over it; where they do not, email for the domain stops working.
Use A records on the bare domain, or your provider ALIAS or ANAME type if it has one.
One nameserver is one thing that can fail and take the whole domain with it.
Configure at least two at your DNS provider. Most do this by default.
Without MX records, mail to the domain bounces — including replies to anyone who writes to the address on your contact page.
Add MX records if you want email here. Safe to ignore if you deliberately use email elsewhere.
The certificate is valid, complete, and trusted by every browser.
An untrusted certificate shows a full-page security warning. Almost nobody clicks through one.
Issue the certificate from a public authority. Self-signed certificates are rejected by every browser.
A certificate issued for a different name is treated exactly like no certificate at all.
Reissue it with your domain in the subject alternative names.
The worst kind of broken, because it looks fine to you. Your browser already cached the intermediate certificate; a visitor on a new phone gets a security warning.
Install the full chain file from your certificate authority, usually named fullchain.pem, rather than the certificate alone.
Certificates expire, usually every 90 days. When one lapses the site is unreachable until somebody notices.
Renew it and confirm auto-renewal is switched on. Then confirm the renewal actually ran once.
Anyone typing the address without https:// stays on an unencrypted connection, and so does anyone following an old link.
Add a permanent 301 redirect from http:// to https:// at your host or CDN.
Without it, the first visit of each session can be intercepted before the redirect happens.
Send Strict-Transport-Security once you are confident every subdomain serves HTTPS.
Forms reach a real destination instead of failing silently.
A form with no destination reloads the page and discards everything typed. The visitor sees no error and assumes it worked. You never find out.
Point the form at a real endpoint, or connect it to a form service. Then send yourself one and confirm it arrives.
A field without a name attribute is not submitted at all, so the message arrives half empty and you cannot tell what is missing.
Add a name to every input, select and textarea.
Without a submit button the form can only be sent by pressing Enter, which many people will not try.
Add a button with type="submit".
Screen readers announce unlabelled fields as unlabelled, and a placeholder vanishes the moment somebody starts typing.
Give each field a label, or an aria-label. A placeholder is not a substitute.
The only way to know a form works is to send one. We fill it in, submit it, and confirm something actually left the page and was acknowledged.
Connect the form to a working endpoint, and show the visitor a confirmation afterwards so they do not send it three times.
The layout holds together on real phone viewports.
Without the viewport tag a phone renders the page at desktop width and shrinks it. Your responsive stylesheet does nothing at all until this tag exists.
Add the viewport meta tag with width=device-width to the head.
One element wider than the screen drags the whole page sideways, and every section below it looks broken. Invisible on a desktop browser at full width, which is why it survives to production.
Find the element wider than the viewport and constrain it. Usually a fixed pixel width, an image without max-width, or a long unbroken string.
A link that is comfortable with a mouse can be almost impossible with a thumb.
Give interactive elements at least 44 pixels in each direction, adding padding if you need to.
Anything under about 12 pixels forces people to pinch to read, and most will not bother.
Set body text to at least 16 pixels on phones.
Search engines and social platforms can read the page.
The most expensive invisible mistake there is. The site looks perfect and simply never appears in search results. Builders and staging environments leave this behind constantly.
Remove the noindex directive from the meta tag or the response header.
A Disallow rule left over from staging blocks every search engine from the entire site.
Remove the site-wide Disallow under User-agent: *.
It is the line people click in search results and the label on their browser tab. Without one they see a bare URL.
Write a title of 10 to 60 characters describing the page.
Without one, search engines invent a snippet from whatever text they find first, which is rarely the sentence you would have chosen.
Write 50 to 160 characters summarising the page.
No H1 leaves nothing stating what the page is about; several muddle it.
Use one H1 for the subject and H2s for the sections beneath it.
Screen readers and translation tools otherwise have to guess, and they guess wrong.
Add a lang attribute to the html element.
If the page is reachable at more than one address, search engines split its ranking between them.
Add a canonical link pointing at the address you want to be the real one.
Without Open Graph tags, a link posted to social media or a messaging app shows a bare URL and no image. It reads as unfinished.
Add og:title, og:description and og:image.
Not required, but it is how search engines find pages that nothing links to yet.
Publish sitemap.xml and reference it from robots.txt.
The blank page icon in a browser tab reads as unfinished, and it is the cheapest thing on this list to fix.
Add a favicon link, or place favicon.ico at the root.
The page loads fast enough to keep visitors.
Measured by Google, the same way it measures you for ranking. A slow page loses visitors before they see anything.
Work through the savings below, largest first. Images are almost always the biggest win.
How long until the biggest thing on screen has loaded. Past about 2.5 seconds people start leaving.
Compress and correctly size the hero image, serve it as WebP or AVIF, and preload it.
Content shifting while the page loads makes people tap the wrong thing, which is worse than being slow.
Set width and height on images and reserve space for anything that loads late.
JavaScript blocking the main thread means early taps are simply ignored, and the visitor thinks the site is broken.
Defer non-essential scripts. Analytics and chat widgets are the usual culprits.
Uncompressed images, unminified code and missing cache headers cost real load time for no benefit.
Address them in order of saving. None of these require redesigning anything.
The site renders and runs in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.
A site that works in Chrome can be blank in Safari. If you use Chrome, you will never see it.
Open the site in the affected browser with the console open and fix the first error reported.
One uncaught error stops the script dead, and everything after it never runs. AI-generated sites fail this in Safari more than anywhere else.
Fix the first error; the later ones usually cascade from it.
Missing images and stylesheets are what make a finished site look half-built. Paths that worked locally often do not once deployed.
Fix or remove the broken references.
A page markedly shorter in one browser usually means a whole section is not rendering there.
Compare side by side in the affected browser. Unsupported CSS is the usual cause.
Every check above, against your live site, in three browser engines. Free, and no account.
Free, and no account. We only read the page — nothing is changed.
The checklist grows as we find new ways AI-built sites break. Nothing on it is ever removed without saying so.
Only when the checklist actually changes. No newsletter, no sequence.