Go-Live Checklist

The go-live checklist is a summary of best practices to consider when launching a website. These steps are generally good practices but have some aspects specific to Adobe Experience Manager.

Steps Before Go-Live

Content and Design QA

Make sure that your content and design conforms to the specifications and that you are happy with the website you see on your projects .hlx.live domain. This may include checks for specific accessibility and SEO requirements of your project.

Performance Validation

Every AEM project should produce a lighthouse score of 100 for mobile and desktop from Google Pagespeed insights on its respective .hlx.live site.

See the document Keeping it 100, Web Performance for more information.

Analytics Validation

Make sure that all your analytics setup and the rest of your martech stack is firing as expected and visitor data is visible in your reporting dashboards.

Legacy Redirects

In most migrations there are legacy URLs that are retired. Make sure those are reflected in your redirects spreadsheet (redirects.xlsx in sharepoint or redirects in google), found in your project content folder. Check Google Search Console for the most impactful backlinks (in terms of SEO) to create redirects for.

See the document Redirects for more information.

Sitemap & Robots

For most websites with a significant number of pages, a sitemap is desirable. AEM automatically generates sitemaps from the query index. For multilingual sites, adding hreflang to the sitemap ensures that the website correctly targets the appropriate geographic and language audience, which is essential for SEO and prevents issues like duplicate content across different language versions (aka SEO cannibalisation) and improves the search engine’s ability to serve the right version of the content to the right users.

If you have a sitemap that’s generated for your site make sure it is discoverable from your robots.txt. ​​Note that robots.txt is (technically) case sensitive, and a good example is:

User-agent: *
Allow: /

Sitemap: https://<your-domain>/sitemap.xml

Note: hlx.page and hlx.live are kept hidden from crawlers intentionally, to avoid duplicate content.

See the documents Indexing and Sitemaps for more information.

Canonical URLs

Make sure canonical URLs return 2xx HTML response status code (not 3xx or 4xx) and that they are correctly implemented, which is crucial for preventing duplicate content issues across the site. Proper canonicalization helps search engines understand which versions of similar pages to index and display in search results, directly impacting SEO performance.

See the following external documentation for more information: Consolidate duplicate urls

Favicon

Adding a favicon to your site gives it a professional look in your visitor’s browsers.

See the document Favicon for more information.

Authentication for Authors

By default, authors don’t need to be logged in to use AEM Sidekick. If you decide you want to control who can preview and publish documents this can be configured.

See the document Configuring Authentication for Authors for more information.

SharePoint Access

If your content is in SharePoint, follow this guide to configure dedicated access which you control.

CDN Configuration

One of the last steps in a go-live is usually to update your CDN configuration (e.g. Cloudflare, Fastly, Akamai, Cloudfront) to point to your hlx.live endpoint.

Ideally the CDN configuration is tested in a staging environment to make sure that everything works as expected, which includes redirects from www to APEX and vice-versa.

Please see the following CDN setup documentation for more information.

Push Invalidation Setup

Make sure push invalidation is properly set up according to the document Configuring Push Invalidation for BYO Production CDN. Test the setup by publishing a small change and verifying that the change is visible on the production domain.

Update Production Host

After setting up your production CDN, add the host property to the sidekick configuration in /tools/sidekick/config.json in your github repo, to allow your authors to navigate directly from the production domain to edit directly from the sidekick.

See the document Sidekick Configuration for more information.

Post Go-Live Validation

Performance Validation

Validate that the performance is still at a lighthouse score of 100 via pagespeed insights on the production environment. Introducing a CDN layer can have adverse performance effects that are usually visible on the protocol layer. Typical culprits are running HTTP/1.1 or ineffective origin caching as well as bot detection or other libraries injected by the CDN configuration.

Google Search Console

If you have an active Google Search Console with your sitemap uploaded, it may be valuable to get a coverage report and make sure that indexing works as expected. The Google Search Console should be monitored for the weeks after a go-live to track the indexing status of new and updated pages, ensuring they are properly recognized by Google. It’s crucial to check for total clicks, total impressions, backlinks changes and crawl errors, as these can significantly impact the site’s SEO performance and authority.

404 Report

After a website has been migrated there is usually a set of 404 Not Founds, which should be monitored after the go-live and redirected to popular page URLs. This information can be pulled from your site analytics and the respective Slack bot report. Monitoring this for the weeks after a go-live is recommended.