The tutorial stops too early
Almost every AI-website tutorial ends at "look, the page appeared". Between that and "a customer found you in search and successfully submitted the form" sits a list of steps nobody covers.
Here it is, in launch order, with rough timings.
1. Content verification (10 min)
- Every number traces to a source — each percentage, each "500+" (see guardrails)
- Every person and company named actually exists, testimonials included
- Every link opens, no 404s
- Every image loads, no external image hosts
- The contact details are yours — AI loves generating
hello@example.com
2. Technical checks (15 min)
- View source (
Ctrl+U, not devtools) and confirm body content is in the initial HTML - Unique title per page,
meta descriptionpresent - robots.txt allows crawling — a staging
Disallow: /shipped to production is the classic incident - sitemap.xml exists and loads
- Keyboard-only pass: Tab reaches every interactive element
- Open it on a real phone, not a devtools device emulator
- Run Lighthouse and know your four scores
3. Forms and interactions (20 min)
This is where it most often falls apart: AI-generated forms are frequently frontend-only.
The submit button fires, a success toast appears, and the data goes nowhere. Your first leads vanish silently.
- Actually submit the form, then confirm it arrived in your inbox, sheet or database
- No backend? Wire up a form service or email notification
- Test the failure paths: offline submit, empty required fields, malformed email
- Success state gives clear feedback, not a silent page
- Add a bot check, or you'll be getting spam within two weeks
4. Deployment (15 min)
- DNS records (propagation can take minutes to hours)
- HTTPS certificate, and confirm
http://redirects tohttps:// - Pick one canonical host (www or apex) and 301 the other to it
- 404 page exists with a route home
- If you serve mainland China: check your CDN/origin location and whether ICP filing is required
That last one is regularly missed on China-facing projects: an unfiled domain cannot serve traffic over ports 80/443 in mainland China, however good the page is.
5. Analytics and monitoring (10 min)
- Install analytics (a privacy-friendly option avoids the cookie banner entirely)
- Confirm it's actually recording — visit the site yourself and check the dashboard
- Add error monitoring, or production errors stay invisible to you
- Track the conversion events: form submits, primary CTA clicks
Without event tracking, a month from now you'll know people visited and nothing about whether they converted.
6. Legal pages (15 min)
Unavoidable for anything commercial:
- Privacy policy — required the moment you collect an email address
- Terms of service
- Refund policy — if you take money
- Cookie notice — if you set non-essential cookies
Don't have an AI write these from nothing. It produces professional-sounding terms that don't match what you actually do, which is worse than having none.
7. First 24 hours after launch
- Submit the sitemap to search console
- Load the site on a real phone on a real network — not your dev machine
- Ask someone uninvolved to complete your primary conversion action, unassisted
- Check that real traffic is showing up in analytics
That last one regularly exposes something missed earlier — no data is more often broken tracking than no visitors.
Want to skip steps 1 and 2? MotionSites prompts come with SEO, accessibility and factual guardrails already written in.