---
name: ship-with-a-publish-checklist
description: Use when good drafts keep going live with broken elements and nobody can say who was meant to catch them.
---

# Ship With a Publish Checklist

Publishing failures are boring and repetitive - a noindex left from staging, a title rewritten by the CMS, an image that never loaded, a canonical pointing at the template. They rarely come from ignorance; they come from the checks living in someone's head. A checklist works only if it is short enough to run every time and covers the things that actually break, which are not the things generic SEO checklists list.

## What you need first

- access to the live URL after publication, not just the CMS preview
- your last few publishes to see which failures actually recur
- a way to request indexing or confirm crawl

## Method

1. Build the checklist from your own last ten publishes. Include only failures that have actually happened on your stack; generic checklists are long enough to be skipped.
2. View the live page in a logged-out private window. Staging banners, draft notices and access gates are invisible when logged in and this catches most of them.
3. View the rendered source and check the title, canonical and robots meta as rendered, not as entered. CMS templates and plugins commonly overwrite one of the three.
4. Confirm the page is reachable by a crawler - linked from somewhere real and present in the sitemap. Requesting indexing on an orphan page rarely holds.
5. Check the page on a narrow viewport with images disabled. Layout breakage and missing alt text both surface immediately and neither shows in desktop preview.
6. Record the publish date and primary query in a tracking sheet at the moment of publishing, so the first performance review in six weeks has a baseline to compare against.

## What this produces

A short stack-specific checklist run against the live URL, plus a logged baseline for later performance review.

## Where this goes wrong

- Checking the CMS preview instead of the live page, which hides the entire class of template and caching failures
- Copying a fifty-point generic checklist that nobody completes, rather than a ten-point one that gets run
- Publishing without recording the date and target query, so later you cannot tell whether the page decayed or never worked

---

From the QuQi skill library - https://www.quqi.io/skills/ship-with-a-publish-checklist