Your Pre-Launch Website Checklist for Singapore SMEs

You have spent weeks, maybe months, and a few thousand dollars getting your new website built. It looks sharp on your laptop, the copy reads well, and you are itching to hit publish and tell the world. Stop for one afternoon. The gap between a site that looks done and a site that is actually ready to earn you customers is a short checklist most Singapore SME owners skip. Rush the launch and you broadcast broken forms and slow pages to every prospect at once, on the very day you sent them there.

The Cost of Going Live Too Soon

Here is what a rushed launch actually costs. Say your announcement email and a boosted Facebook post send 500 people to your new site in the first week. If the contact form silently fails on mobile, which is a genuinely common bug, and 20 of them tried to enquire, you have just lost 20 warm leads and you will never even know they existed. At an average job value of SGD 2,000, three lost jobs is SGD 6,000 gone in launch week alone. The traffic you worked hardest to earn hits your weakest, least-tested version. A calm afternoon of checking is the cheapest insurance you will ever buy.

Check It on a Real Phone First

• Open the site on your own phone — not just the browser preview; use a real Android and an iPhone if you can borrow one
• Read the text without pinching — no tiny fonts, no words running off the edge of the screen
• Tap every button with your thumb — buttons that are easy to click with a mouse can be a fiddle on a small screen
• Run it through Google PageSpeed Insights — aim for a mobile score in the green; anything over three seconds to load bleeds visitors
• Compress oversized images — a single 4MB hero photo is the most common reason a Singapore SME site crawls on mobile data
• Test on 4G, not just office WiFi — many of your visitors are browsing on the MRT, not on fibre broadband

Test Every Link, Form, and Contact Point

1. 1Click every link in the menu and footer — including the logo, the social icons, and that one link you added at the last minute
2. 2Submit your contact form as a real customer would — then confirm the enquiry actually lands in your inbox, not your spam folder
3. 3Check where enquiries go — a form that works but emails a staff member who has left is worse than no form at all
4. 4Test your WhatsApp button on a phone — tapping it should open WhatsApp with your correct business number, not a mistyped one
5. 5Call the phone number on the site — make sure it is tappable on mobile and rings the right handset
6. 6Remove every placeholder — lorem ipsum, empty pages, and 'coming soon' labels tell visitors you are not ready

Cover the SEO, Analytics, and Legal Basics

• Unique page titles and meta descriptions — every page needs its own; duplicates confuse Google and waste your search visibility
• Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console — this tells Google your site exists and shows you which pages get found
• Install Google Analytics (GA4) — without it, launch-day traffic is invisible and you cannot tell what is working
• Check the share preview — paste your URL into WhatsApp or LinkedIn and confirm the right title and image show up
• Add a PDPA-compliant privacy policy page — if you collect names, emails, or phone numbers through a form, Singapore's PDPA expects you to say how you use them
• Link the privacy policy near your forms — a simple line under the submit button is enough for most SME sites

Lock in Security, Then Soft-Launch

• Confirm HTTPS with the padlock — the whole site should load on https with no 'not secure' warning; Chrome flags sites that do not
• Force http to redirect to https — someone typing your bare domain should land on the secure version automatically
• Add a favicon — the little icon in the browser tab; a missing one makes a brand new site look unfinished
• Set up a friendly 404 page — with a link back to the homepage, so a mistyped URL does not dead-end a visitor
• Take a full backup before and after launch — so a bad update can be rolled back in minutes, not rebuilt from scratch
• Soft-launch to a few people first — send the link to five friends or loyal customers, ask them to enquire, and watch what confuses them before you announce publicly