Web Copywriting
The Copy Checklist to Run Before a Site Goes Live
Launch day surfaces the things nobody owned: placeholder text, a form that goes nowhere, and three pages describing a service that changed in month two.
Every website launch ships something embarrassing. Not because anyone was careless, but because the last two weeks are spent on the things that are visibly unfinished, and the copy problems that survive are the ones nobody was assigned.
Placeholder Text Always Survives Somewhere
Search the entire site for "lorem", for "TBC", for the client's name in square brackets, and for the phrases your team uses while drafting. It is on the 404 page, in a form error message, in an email template, or in the meta description of a page nobody opened.
Do this as a search across the whole codebase and content, not by clicking pages. The instances that survive launch are precisely the ones on screens nobody visits by hand.
Check the Copy Nobody Owns
- The 404 page: almost always default, and it is seen by people who were trying to reach you.
- Form validation messages: whatever the framework shipped with, usually blaming the user.
- Confirmation and thank-you screens: the highest-attention moment on the site, almost always wasted on "Thank you for your submission".
- Automated emails: enquiry receipts and notifications, written by a developer as a placeholder in week one.
- Cookie and consent text: pasted from a generator, often naming a different company.
- Empty states: any list, search or dashboard that can be empty before it has content.
Submit the enquiry form yourself, from a real device, and follow what happens end to end: the confirmation screen, the email you receive, the email the team receives. Broken forms are the most common launch failure and they fail silently.
Consistency Across Pages, Not Within Them
Every page is checked individually and none is checked against the others, so sites launch stating two different turnaround times, two different price points and two spellings of their own service names.
Pull every number, promise and product name onto one list and compare them. Turnaround, response time, pricing, guarantee wording, team size, years in business — anywhere two pages disagree, one of them is wrong and a customer will find it.
Every Claim Should Have a Source
Go through the site marking claims you could not evidence if a customer asked. Client numbers, satisfaction figures, years established, awards, certifications. Anything inherited from an old site, a competitor's phrasing, or an enthusiastic first draft needs to be verified or removed before launch, not after someone quotes it back to you.
Pay particular attention to anything carried over from a previous site or a template. Inherited copy routinely contains another company's phone number, client names or statistics, and it survives precisely because nobody thinks to question text that was already there.
The Technical Copy Checks
- One h1 per page, and it should be the page's actual subject.
- A unique meta title and description on every page, written rather than generated from the h1.
- No duplicate descriptions — the fastest way to find templated copy nobody finished.
- Image alt text that describes the image, for people who cannot see it.
- Internal links that resolve, including the ones in the footer and the breadcrumbs.
- Old URLs redirected if this replaces an existing site — the most expensive launch mistake of all.
Read It Aloud, Once, in Order
The last check is the cheapest. Read the main path out loud — homepage, service page, contact — in one sitting. Repetition, contradictions and sentences nobody would say are all obvious when spoken and invisible on screen after the fortieth read.
The small strings are worth their own pass: see the words on buttons, labels and errors. And if a page still feels wrong at this stage, it is usually length doing the damage — word counts by page type covers where that goes wrong. Our website copywriting service runs this pass on every project.