Guide
The 7 checks to run before delivering a site
The short list of what we look at before sending the delivery email. None of these seven points needs any special access, and each of them has already cost someone a weekend.
6 min readUpdated August 25, 2026
1. Why a list, and not a habit
You know these seven points. Knowing them was never the problem: the problem is doing all of them, on delivery day, when the client has been waiting three days and it is seven in the evening. A written list gets ticked; a habit gets skipped.
It has a second, less obvious use: attached to the delivery email, it states what you checked. It is no longer a site delivered, it is a site delivered and verified — and the day something breaks outside those seven points, the conversation does not start in the same place.
2. The seven points
ONE — The domain expires in more than sixty days and auto-renewal is on, with a valid payment method. Check the actual date at the registry, not what a dashboard displays. TWO — The certificate covers the bare domain AND the www subdomain, its chain is complete, and it renews on its own. THREE — The bare domain and www lead to the same place, over HTTPS, without a pointless chain of redirects.
FOUR — The MX records point at the right mail service, and SPF, DKIM and DMARC are in place. This is the most frequently skipped point, because mail is “out of scope” — until the site's forms stop arriving. FIVE — The site answers from outside, not only from your machine: an entry in your hosts file or a local DNS cache will have you sign off a site nobody else can see.
SIX — The IP addresses of the site and its mail are on no blacklist, especially on shared hosting: you inherit your neighbours' reputation. SEVEN — Someone is named to receive the alerts after delivery. Without this seventh point, the first six only hold for the day you did them.
Check your own domain, right now
The full report covers four of the seven points at once — expiry, certificate, email authentication and reputation. Enter the domain of the site you are about to deliver.
3. And after delivery
Six of these seven points are snapshots: true on delivery day, they say nothing about the following month. A certificate renews badly, a domain nears its deadline, an IP gets flagged after a password leak next door.
That is precisely what the seventh point is for, and it is the only one that calls for a decision rather than a check: deciding that someone is watching, and with what. Whether that is us or something else matters less than deciding it before closing the project.
The seventh point, without thinking about it.
Add the domain at delivery, and the other six points are re-checked continuously — several times a day for the certificate and availability, daily for expiry and reputation. Five domains free, with no time limit.
Start for freeFive domains free, forever. No card required.