Pre-launch website proofreading checklist
A casual pre-launch read misses errors across long-tail pages. Verant reads the published site and returns the copy fixes worth making before launch.
A scan visualized: Verant reads yoursite.com the way a visitor does and catches 3 issues in place — each flagged fragment quoted verbatim, with the correction shown beside it, ready to fix.
A pre-launch website proofreading checklist should cover six kinds of copy error on every page: spelling and typos, grammar, punctuation and spacing, clarity, style and consistency, and leftover placeholder or template copy. Check the whole published site, not just the home page — the errors that embarrass you are on the pages you stopped re-reading.
Proofreading is the copy pass only. Broken links, SEO metadata, page speed, and accessibility matter at launch too, but they are separate checks — keep them off the proofreading list so neither pass gives a false sense of done. Verant runs the copy pass automatically across a whole site and drops the weak suggestions before showing you the list.
Proofread the whole site, not the home page
The home page gets read a hundred times before launch. The pages that ship with errors are the ones that got built once and never revisited: the deep service page, the older blog post, the templated location or product page cloned from a starter. A pre-launch pass has to cover all of them, which is why a crawl beats a click-through — it checks every public page the same way instead of relying on you to remember each one.
Run the pass on the staging or production build, not on a draft in a document. The text being checked is whatever the CMS, theme, and plugins actually rendered to the page — which can differ from what you typed in the editor.
The copy checklist
Copy errors to proofread
Everything a proofreading pass catches. Run each line across every page, not just the home page.
- Spelling and typos Misspellings, transposed letters, and doubled or dropped words — on every page, including the long-tail ones you stopped re-reading.
- Grammar Subject-verb agreement, tense, and sentence-structure errors in the visible copy after the page renders.
- Punctuation and spacing Missing, doubled, or misused punctuation; stray double spaces; inconsistent quotes, hyphens, and dashes.
- Clarity Sentences that are hard to read or ambiguous to a first-time visitor who lacks your context.
- Style and consistency Awkward or clumsy phrasing, and copy that reads inconsistently from one page to the next.
- Placeholder and template copy Leftover lorem ipsum, "your text here", "Hello world!", sample product descriptions, and untouched theme defaults that shipped by accident.
Also check separately (not part of the copy pass)
These matter at launch too, but a proofreading pass does not cover them — run them with the right tool, so a clean copy pass is never mistaken for a finished launch.
- Broken links and redirects Use a link checker — proofreading reads copy, it does not validate URLs.
- SEO metadata Title tags, meta descriptions, and Open Graph data are an SEO check, not a copy check (though the words inside them are still worth proofreading).
- Accessibility WCAG conformance, contrast, and screen-reader behavior need an accessibility audit.
- Facts and figures Prices, dates, names, and claims need a human fact-check — proofreading checks how copy reads, not whether it is true.
How to run the copy pass before launch
What ‘verified’ means
Weak suggestions are dropped before they reach you. What remains quotes the exact text on your page, with the fix beside it.
Keep going
Related reading: website proofreading software, find leftover placeholder text, lorem ipsum, and proofread a Webflow site before handoff.
- Website proofreading software What website proofreading is, the full "what Verant catches" taxonomy, and how single-page checks compare to a full-site crawl.
- Find leftover placeholder text The placeholder line of the checklist, expanded: what counts, why it ships, and how to find every instance.
- Verant for Webflow Run the copy pass before an agency handoff — proofread every Webflow page from the URL.
Frequently asked questions
What should a pre-launch proofreading checklist include?
Every kind of copy error a proofreading pass catches: spelling and typos, grammar, punctuation and spacing, clarity, style and consistency, and leftover placeholder or template copy. Run each across every page, not just the home page.
Is proofreading the same as a full pre-launch QA?
No. Proofreading is the copy pass. A full pre-launch QA also covers broken links, SEO metadata, page speed, and accessibility — those are separate checks with their own tools. Keep them off the proofreading list so each pass is judged on its own job.
Should I proofread every page or just the important ones?
Every public page. The errors that embarrass you at launch are on the pages you stopped re-reading — deep service pages, older posts, and templated pages stamped out from one starter. A full-site crawl checks all of them the same way.
How does Verant fit into a pre-launch pass?
It runs the copy pass automatically: crawl the published site, proofread every page, and drop the weak suggestions before showing you the list — so you review genuine issues with the page and the line named, not a wall of false positives.
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