Guide

The Shopify Store Launch Checklist

Development14 July 202616 pages

What you'll learn in this guide.

A Shopify store can be trading in a fortnight, which is why so many launch with a broken tax setting, no redirect map and a pixel that fires twice. This checklist is organised by phase rather than by department, because the expensive mistakes are sequencing mistakes — decisions made after the build that should have been made before it. Ten phases from catalogue structure to the first thirty days, including the checkout extensibility deadlines that have now passed, and a one-page sign-off sheet nobody launches without.

The catalogue, shipping and tax decisions that are cheap now and a data migration later
How to set an app policy at the start, when it is still possible to enforce one
The checkout configuration that addresses the documented reasons people abandon carts
Which legacy Shopify checkout code has now stopped running, and what replaces it
How to build and test a redirect map so a replatform keeps its search traffic
The tracking checks that stop a year of decisions being based on fiction
A launch-day hour-by-hour list and a thirty-day baseline routine
A one-page sign-off sheet with an owner against every line

Inside the guide

Phase 1 — Decisions to make before anyone opens the theme editor
Phase 2 — Theme, performance budget and accessibility
Phase 3 — Products and merchandising
Phase 4 — Checkout, and the extensibility deadlines
Phase 5 — Shipping, tax and fulfilment
Phase 6 — Content, legal and trust
Phase 7 — SEO and migration
Phase 8 — Tracking
Phase 9 — Email and lifecycle
Phase 10 — Launch day and the first thirty days
Appendix — The one-page launch sign-off

Everything that has to be true before you take the password page down — in the order it has to be decided.

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