The Shopify Launch Checklist

How to use this Shopify launch checklist

Work through the phases in order. The sequence matters: foundation settings such as store currency and primary domain are genuinely painful to change once orders exist, so they come first. Catalogue accuracy comes next, because the most expensive launch mistake we see is products sitting in Draft status — imported, inventoried, and completely invisible to customers.

If you are migrating rather than launching new, one item outranks everything else on this list: mapping 301 redirects from every old URL to its new equivalent. That single step decides whether you keep years of accumulated search equity or start from zero. Our Shopify migration process treats the redirect map as non-negotiable for exactly that reason.

Two checks are skipped more often than any others, and both are cheap: place a real test transaction through your live payment gateway (a test-mode success proves nothing about production), and complete a full purchase on an actual mobile phone. Most of your traffic is mobile, and desktop-only testing reliably hides the failures that cost the most.

What this checklist is built from

These are not generic best practices copied from documentation. Every item exists because we have found it broken on a real store — including our own. We operate a live Shopify store carrying 9,000+ products, so the catalogue, inventory and import items come from problems we have personally caused and fixed. The speed section maps directly to Google’s Core Web Vitals thresholds, and the SEO section reflects the indexation problems that Shopify’s default architecture creates if nobody addresses them.

Once you are live, the work shifts from launching to compounding: Shopify SEO to earn traffic, speed optimisation to keep Core Web Vitals passing as you add apps, and conversion optimisation to earn more from the traffic you already have. Our conversion calculator shows what even a small conversion lift is worth on your numbers.