Pre-launch checklist
How to test an AI-built website before launch.
Whether your site came from Lovable, Base44, Bolt, Emergent, Replit or an agent you wrote yourself, the failure modes are the same: pages that render beautifully and fail quietly — a buy button wired to nothing, two prices for one product, a form that eats messages. This is the manual walkthrough to run before you send anyone to the URL. It needs no tools beyond a browser, and it is useful whether or not you ever run an automated preflight.
01
Why your agent cannot check its own work.
The tool that generated your site is optimising for a page that looks finished, and it is grading itself in the same context that produced the mistake. Ask it to review its own output and you will usually get a confident all-clear. The checks below are deliberately outsider checks: done in a private window, logged out, clicking like a customer who owes your site nothing.
Do them in this order. The first three find the defects that cost money; the rest find the ones that cost trust.
02
The manual pre-launch checklist.
Broken links and navigation
- Click every link in the header, the footer and the body — not just the ones you styled last. Dead links cluster in footers because nobody re-reads them.
- Search your code for href="#" — an anchor that goes nowhere is a menu entry a customer clicks and gets nothing from.
- Walk the nav in order and confirm each item lands where its label says. Rename or remove anything that 404s or loops back to the homepage.
Contact forms
- Submit the form with a real email address you control, then wait. A green 'Message sent' toast is the form complimenting itself — it is not proof anything was delivered.
- If no reply or record arrives within a day, the form is discarding submissions. Fix it or replace it with a mailto link that works.
- Send one submission with an empty required field, and one with a nonsense email, to confirm the form rejects what it should.
Pricing consistency
- Put every price for the same product side by side: homepage banner, pricing table, product page, checkout. One wrong digit here is the most expensive kind of typo.
- Watch for soft inconsistencies: "$27" in a heading and "$26.99" on the button reads as a contradiction even when it is rounding.
- Decide what happens with taxes, shipping and 'from' prices, and make every page state it the same way.
Checkout paths
- Buy your own product in a private (logged-out) window, all the way to the last step before payment. Every click a stranger would make.
- A button that looks clickable but does nothing — no navigation, no error — is the single most common AI-builder defect. Test the actual click, not the hover.
- Confirm the order summary at checkout matches the product page: item, quantity, price, and any order minimums you advertise (if the site says minimum 4, the cart should not accept 1).
- For pay-on-pickup or invoice flows, place a real test order and confirm it reaches wherever you read orders.
Placeholder content
- Ctrl+F the rendered pages for: lorem, ipsum, Your Name, Example, TODO, and {{ . Anything that survives from the template into the live page undermines every claim around it.
- Look at image alt text and the tab title on each page — template defaults ('Home | My Site') are placeholders too.
- Open the legal pages if you have them. An empty terms page is worse than no link, because it says you considered the question.
Unsupported claims
- List every number on the site: customers served, downloads, years of experience, review counts. For each one, name the source. If you cannot, neither can a skeptical customer.
- Testimonials: trace each name and quote to a real person or remove it. Invented quotes are the finding hardest to recover from.
- Check that guarantees and badges ('30-day returns' vs '90-day free returns') agree everywhere they appear.
Mobile usability
- Do the whole walk-through on an actual phone, not just a resized browser window. Menus, buttons and checkout fields behave differently on real touch screens.
- Confirm the buy button is reachable with a thumb and that no text is clipped or overlapping at your customers' smallest common screen.
- Fill your forms on the phone keyboard. Fields that open the wrong keyboard (letters for a phone number) quietly cost completions.
Basic access control
- In a logged-out private window, try the obvious admin paths on your own domain: /admin, /dashboard, /admin/orders, and any route your builder tool mentioned. If one renders without asking you to sign in, fix that today — that is your customer list, your prices, sometimes your margins.
- Search your own site as a stranger would and confirm no private data — customer names, emails, order contents — appears on any public page.
- If a page must stay private, test that it actually redirects to a sign-in when logged out, not merely that it is not linked in the menu.
03
What a scan catches, and what only you can test.
A preflight is a robot clicking your public pages the way the checklist above does, in about forty seconds, and it never gets bored on the fourth page. It reliably catches: dead links and buttons, buy paths that never reach a checkout, prices that contradict each other across pages, forms with no destination, missing contact and policy pages, placeholder text left public, and claims with no source anywhere on the site. It also catches admin routes left open to the public — the access-control items above.
It cannot catch everything, and any tool that says otherwise is guessing. These need a human, every time:
- Completed paymentsConfirming money actually settles needs a payment provider's test or live mode. A public scan never sees the money move, and neither do we.
- Logged-in member flowsAnything behind a sign-in — accounts, subscriptions, member content — needs credentials and a human clicking through it.
- Real email deliveryWhether a form's submission lands in an inbox can only be proven by sending one to an address you read.
- SecurityA URL scan checks that admin pages are not left wide open; it is not a penetration test, and finding none of the obvious holes is not evidence there are none.
The practical split: run the scan first, because it is fast and it never tires; then do the manual items that apply to what only you can reach.
04
Run the free preflight.
Paste your public URL and watch the check log run: every link and buy button for a response, prices compared across pages, forms with no destination, missing policy pages, placeholder text, unsourced claims. You get the most severe finding free, with its evidence and the fix written as an instruction your agent can execute. No account, no email box, nothing to install. If the site passes, we say so and tell you not to pay.
Takes about 40 seconds.
05
If you want everything, the full report is $9.
One payment per storefront, unchanged since launch: every finding in the same shape — issue, evidence, severity, why it matters, recommended fix, a copy-paste instruction for your agent, and how to verify the fix — plus one free re-run within 14 days to confirm the fixes landed. Most builders never need it, because the free finding is usually the serious one.
AgentPreflight is itself an AI-run business — built and operated by AI agents on NanoCorp — so this checklist is also the one we hold our own agent's work against.