What to do with your website after launch: the first 90 days

On launch day it feels like the work is done. The domain works, the design is approved, the last fixes are in place. But a website left unattended after launch brings no inquiries and slowly degrades. Pages drop out of search, forms break after updates, content goes stale. A year later, such a site is often easier to rebuild than to revive.

To avoid that, you need a plan for the first 90 days. The plan is universal. It works for a landing page, a corporate website and an online store alike.

In the first two weeks, make sure everything works

Right after launch, the technical check takes priority over everything else. Mistakes at this stage are the most expensive because they are invisible. A site can stay out of search for months or silently lose inquiries, and the owner only finds out when they start looking for the reason there are no clients.

Indexing in Google Search Console

Add your site to Google Search Console, verify ownership and submit the sitemap. This tells the search engine directly that the site exists and gives it the full list of pages. Then check the indexing report once a week. It shows which pages are already in search, which are not, and why they were left out.

Review the errors separately. The usual suspects are unnecessary redirects, duplicate pages and sections accidentally blocked from indexing. On freshly launched sites this happens more often than you would expect, and it is best fixed in the first weeks, while the search engine is still forming its picture of the site.

HTTPS and robots.txt

Check that the site opens only over HTTPS and that old http addresses redirect to the secure version. An expired or misconfigured SSL certificate scares visitors off with a browser warning and hurts rankings. Open the robots.txt file right away. After a move from a staging environment it often still carries a blanket ban on indexing, and it is exactly that one line that keeps a new project out of search for months.

Analytics: GA4 and key events

Make sure the Google Analytics (GA4) tag is installed on every page and collecting data. The tag alone tells you little. Set up form submissions, clicks on the phone number and on messaging-app buttons as key events. Without key events you see visitors but miss what matters most, which is how many of them sent an inquiry or tapped a contact button and which channel they came from.

Forms and email

Send a test inquiry through every form on the site. Check that the email arrived at the right address, did not land in spam and contains all the form fields. If there are several forms, test each one separately. In our experience, the one that breaks is always the one nobody checked. And agree right away on who answers inquiries. A quick reply within the first hours noticeably improves your chance of a sale.

Speed and the mobile version

Open the key pages on your own phone and check the essentials. How fast do they load, are the buttons easy to tap, is the layout intact? Most of your visitors will come from a smartphone, so the mobile version usually matters more than the desktop one. Some B2B projects are the exception, because decisions there are made from a work computer, and then the desktop cannot be left for later. For an objective measurement, run the main pages through PageSpeed Insights and save the results so you have something to compare against in a few months.

Backups and updates

Set up automatic backups of both files and the database, and store them somewhere other than the server itself. Decide who updates the system and plugins, and how often. A WordPress or OpenCart site without updates becomes vulnerable over time, and restoring a hacked site always takes longer and hurts more than routine maintenance.

In the first month, start promoting the site and gather feedback

Once the technical foundation is solid, it is time to bring people in. Waiting for visitors to arrive on their own can take a very long time, since a new site with no advertising and no search rankings is effectively invisible.

Launch at least one traffic channel

Choose the channel based on your type of business. For services with urgent demand, such as appliance repair or legal help, paid search ads work fastest, since the person is looking for a solution right now and is ready to reach out. For visually driven products, say clothing, home decor or gifts, it makes more sense to start with ads on Instagram or TikTok. For B2B, Facebook and gradual work on search traffic tend to perform well. If running the campaigns yourself is not an option, we take that on as part of Google Ads management.

If you plan to sell online, the channels are worth choosing as early as the e-commerce development stage, so the product pages are ready to receive paid traffic from day one.

Do not spread yourself thin. One channel that you have set up and actually control will bring more than three running at half strength. The first month of advertising is also research. You learn the real cost of an inquiry and see which queries and audiences bring clients, and which only burn the budget. Our breakdown of where the advertising budget goes shows which parts of that spend are clicks and which are the work around them. If the budget is very tight, start with free options. Set up company profiles on social media, ask for mentions in local communities, add a link to the site in your email signature.

First external links

A search engine trusts a site more when other resources link to it. In the first weeks you do not need elaborate link building. A few basic and natural mentions are enough:

• company listings in local business directories;
• a Google Business Profile with your address, phone and business hours;
• pages on industry platforms and in topical communities;
• links from your social media and work email.

Such mentions do not produce an instant jump in rankings, but they help the search engine find the site faster and lay the groundwork for later growth.

Collect feedback

Ask your first clients how they found the site, whether everything was clear, and what got in the way of sending an inquiry. Two or three such conversations are worth more than a week of internal debate. In parallel, study behavior in analytics. See which pages people visit most, where they click, and which pages they leave without taking action. Do not jump to conclusions after the first three visitors. You need at least a few hundred sessions to decide anything. Within a month you will have a picture you can actually work with.

In months two and three, base changes on data

Some 30–45 days after launch you have your first statistics, and they should drive the changes. “I feel like the button is the wrong color.” That is not an argument for edits. A real argument comes from the data. “Most visitors leave the service page without scrolling to the form.”

Typical changes the data suggests:

• rewrite or shorten a page that visitors are leaving en masse;
• move a form or button higher if people simply never reach it;
• add answers to the questions clients keep asking in messaging apps and over the phone;
• rework or remove a section nobody visits.

Make changes one at a time and give each of them at least one to two weeks to prove itself. If you change everything at once, you will never know what actually worked and what did harm.

Content and SEO are a long game

Months two and three are the right time to grow your content. Expand the service pages, add the details clients ask about. Publish reviews. They dispel the distrust a new site naturally faces. Describe completed projects as case studies. Show what the situation was, what you did, what result the client got. Such materials convince better than any promise, and regular project support helps keep this content work going. If you have the resources, start a blog and answer your customers’ real questions there. Such articles gradually bring in search traffic without you having to pay for every click.

The first tangible search rankings take months of systematic work. In our experience, a new domain often needs six to twelve months to build authority, and not only in competitive niches. The search engine has to index the site, evaluate the content and compare it with competitors who have been around for years. So do not expect top rankings in a week, and be wary of anyone who promises them. Realistic timelines for different niches are covered in our article on when the first SEO results appear. Track progress in Google Search Console. If impressions and clicks grow steadily, you are moving in the right direction. A slow start in search is normal, and that is exactly why a new site needs paid or social traffic in the first months while search engine optimization gains momentum.

Common mistakes after launch

• Abandoning the site completely. This is the most common scenario. The site goes live, everyone exhales and returns to daily business. Half a year later it turns out the forms stopped working after some update, and the site never appeared in search at all.
• Redesigning constantly. The opposite extreme hurts just as much. The owner rearranges blocks and recolors buttons weekly, guided by mood. Statistics never accumulate, conclusions become impossible, and the site lives in a state of permanent renovation.
• Pushing paid traffic to an unready site. If pages load slowly, the form misbehaves on phones and GA4 key events are not set up, advertising simply burns money. Fix the foundation first, then turn on the traffic.
• Watching only the visitor count. A thousand visitors without a single inquiry is worse than a hundred with ten. Track conversions and the quality of inquiries, not the pretty traffic number in a report.

What to do yourself and what to delegate

Not everything on this list requires a contractor, but not everything is worth carrying alone either. Here is a sensible way to divide the work.

What you can realistically do yourself

• answer inquiries and talk to clients, since nobody will do this better than you;
• draft the service texts and collect reviews, since you know your business from the inside;
• review the basic GA4 and Google Search Console reports on visitors, inquiries and indexing errors once a week.

What is better to delegate

• updates, backups and security, because the cost of a mistake here is too high;
• code and layout fixes, and work on loading speed;
• setting up key events in analytics and integrations with a CRM or messaging apps;
• running the ads if you have no experience, since without it the budget runs out faster than the insights arrive.

Delegating does not mean hiring someone full time. A contractor on a support plan checks the technical health of the site every month and makes fixes out of a set block of hours, and that covers most needs of a small business. That is exactly how we run projects within our project support. Our technical plan costs $400 a month and includes 20 hours of work. Routine work follows a schedule, while critical issues, such as the site being down or payments failing, are handled the same day on a plan. Your role does not disappear. You set the tasks, look at the numbers and make decisions, while the contractor makes sure the site runs fast and stays stable.

Conclusions

The first 90 days decide whether the site becomes a working tool or an online brochure everyone forgets about. Two weeks go to the technical check, indexing and analytics; the first month to launching traffic and collecting feedback; months two and three to data-driven changes and growing the content. Do not leave the site unattended, do not change everything on a whim, and do not expect instant results from SEO.

If you would rather not keep this whole list in your head, hand the technical part over to us. Within our project support service we take care of updates, backups and speed.