Launch with the public surface checked.

Check the infrastructure first. Later SEO tests are misleading when DNS points to the wrong origin, the certificate does not cover the hostname, or redirect behavior differs between URL variants.

• Verify apex, www, IPv4, IPv6, and authoritative nameserver records resolve as intended.
• Confirm the production certificate covers every public hostname and serves a complete, currently valid chain.
• Test supported TLS protocols and the HTTP-to-HTTPS and preferred-host redirect path.
• Review security headers only after the final production response is reachable.

Staging restrictions are often copied into production. Inspect discovery, canonicalization, internal navigation, and presentation signals on the exact final URLs users will visit.

• Remove accidental noindex directives, authentication gates, and production-wide robots.txt blocks.
• Publish the preferred canonical URLs in a fetchable XML sitemap and declare it in robots.txt.
• Check titles, descriptions, headings, canonical tags, structured data, image alternatives, and social metadata.
• Crawl important navigation paths for broken links, then submit the sitemap and inspect priority URLs in Search Console.