The Shopify launch checklist: what we check before a store goes live

Every item here is on the list because it has gone wrong on a real launch. Grouped by consequence, because if you only have an afternoon you should spend it on the first group.

Group 1 — things that cost money immediately

• Place a real order. Your own card, your own money, every payment method you have enabled. Then refund it. This catches more than any amount of staging review.
• Check tax is calculating for every region you ship to, including the ones you forgot you enabled.
• Check shipping rates against weight and destination. A misconfigured rate either loses the order or loses the margin.
• Confirm order confirmation emails send, from your domain, not a spoofed one. Check SPF and DKIM.
• Test the inventory decrement. If stock does not drop on order you will oversell on day one.
• Check discount codes stack the way you intended. Then try to break them.

Group 2 — things that cost trust

• Every policy page written and linked: shipping, returns, refunds, privacy, terms.
• A working contact method with someone watching it.
• No placeholder text anywhere. Search the theme for "Lorem" and for the theme author name.
• All images have alt text and none are 4MB.
• The 404 page has navigation back into the store.
• Mobile tested on a real phone, not a resized browser.

Group 3 — things that cost search traffic

• Password protection removed. Obvious, routinely forgotten, and it means nothing gets indexed.
• robots.txt not blocking anything you want crawled.
• Canonical tags pointing to the live domain, not the myshopify one.
• Redirects in place if you are replacing an old site. Every URL with traffic or a link, mapped to its nearest equivalent. Not all to the homepage.
• Sitemap submitted to Search Console and Bing.
• Analytics and conversion tracking firing, verified by placing that test order and watching it appear.

The day after

Watch the order flow for 48 hours. Check for failed payments, check the support inbox, check that nothing is overselling. Launch is not the finish line — the first two days tell you what the staging environment could not.