You have spent weeks building the site. It looks great. The client loves the design. You are ready to hand it over.

But wait. Before you push that launch button there are five things every WordPress site needs to have in place. Skip them and you are setting yourself up for embarrassing calls, unhappy clients and late-night fixes.

Go through this checklist every single time. No exceptions.

1. Your Site Speed Needs to Pass the Test

This one surprises a lot of developers. You build the site, it looks clean and you assume it is fast. Then you run it through Google PageSpeed Insights and the score comes back at 48 on mobile.

A slow site is one of the most common things clients complain about after launch. And fixing it becomes your problem even if speed was never mentioned in the original brief.

Run your site through PageSpeed Insights before handover. Check both mobile and desktop. A score below 70 on mobile means something needs fixing before you deliver.

Common culprits are images that have not been optimised, a caching plugin that has not been set up and a theme loading scripts it does not need.

2. SSL and HTTPS Need to Be Properly Configured

Every modern browser shows a Not Secure warning on sites that are not running HTTPS. If your client’s visitors see that warning the moment they land on the site it immediately damages trust.

Most hosting providers give you a free SSL certificate. Installing it takes a couple of minutes. The thing people often miss is making sure every single page redirects to HTTPS and that there are no mixed content issues where some resources are still loading over HTTP.

Use the Really Simple SSL plugin to catch and fix mixed content automatically.

3. Basic SEO Needs to Be Set Up

You do not need to do full SEO work before delivering a site. But you do need to make sure the basics are in place so the client is not starting from zero.

Install Yoast SEO or RankMath. Generate an XML sitemap. Submit it to Google Search Console. Check that the robots.txt file is not accidentally blocking search engines from indexing the site. This happens more often than you would think because WordPress has a built-in setting that blocks indexing which sometimes gets left on by mistake.

Make sure every page has a title tag and meta description. It does not need to be perfect SEO copy. It just needs to be there and make sense.

4. Security Basics Need to Be In Place

A fresh WordPress installation straight out of the box is not very secure. It uses predictable file paths, allows unlimited login attempts and shows which version of WordPress it is running.

Before you deliver any site do these things. Change the default login URL. Install a plugin to limit login attempts. Enable two-factor authentication on the admin account. Install Wordfence and run an initial security scan.

Also disable file editing in the WordPress dashboard by adding this to wp-config.php.

define( ‘DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT’, true );

5. Backups Need to Be Live and Tested

This is the one most people leave for later. Do not leave it for later.

A site without backups is a site waiting for a disaster. Plugins break things after updates. Clients accidentally delete content. Servers have problems. When something goes wrong the first question is always the same. Is there a backup?

Install UpdraftPlus and set it up to run daily backups stored to Google Drive or Dropbox. Then do a test restore before you hand the site over. An untested backup is not a backup you can rely on.

Hand It Over With Confidence

Work through this checklist on every project and you will deliver sites that are fast, secure and properly set up. Your clients will notice the difference and you will spend far less time firefighting after launch.

At CodingBrackets we treat every one of these steps as standard on every project we deliver. If you want a team that takes the details seriously, get in touch.