Launch & handoff

Launch is its own phase, not a footnote at the end of the build. Going live well takes a checklist, communication, and a couple of hours of actual coordinated work — and "well" matters because the cost of a bad launch is paid in trust, not just engineering time.

The week before launch

A launch-readiness review covers:

• Final content pass — copy, images, legal text, contact details
• Analytics + tracking verification (GA4, Plausible, GTM, whatever you use)
• Third-party integrations (Stripe, Calendly, your CRM, etc.) tested end-to-end
• Email deliverability — transactional emails actually arriving from your domain
• Performance + accessibility audit (Lighthouse 90+ across the board is the minimum bar)
• SEO audit — meta tags, structured data, sitemap, robots.txt, redirects from the old site
• Backup and restore procedure tested
• Monitoring + error tracking wired up (we use Sentry by default)

If anything fails the review, we don't launch. We fix and re-run.

DNS — the actual flip

Launch day usually means a 15–60 minute DNS change. The exact records depend on your hosting setup; we'll send you the ones you need a week ahead and confirm with your DNS admin (which might be you).

For a typical Vercel-hosted site:

• A record at the apex domain pointing to 76.76.21.21
• CNAME for www pointing to cname.vercel-dns.com
• Existing MX records untouched — your email keeps working

More on DNS specifically on the support site.

Redirects

If we're replacing an existing site, every URL on the old site that has external links pointing to it gets a redirect to the most-relevant new URL. We crawl the old site as part of discovery so this isn't a surprise — by launch the redirect map is already written.

What you receive at launch

At launch you receive:

1. A live site on your domain, on Solagon-managed hosting that's monitored and maintained as part of the retainer.
2. A runbook for your side of the operation — how to log in, where to upload new content, who to contact for what kind of issue.
3. Editor access to whatever content surfaces are designed to be edited by your team (CMS, blog, etc.).
4. A walkthrough of the live site — written or recorded — so anyone on your team can use it confidently from day one.
5. The first monthly retainer invoice, billed on the earlier of go-live or five business days after we notified you the site was production-ready.

While the retainer is active, the codebase, repository, hosting accounts, and vendor accounts are managed by Solagon. Final ownership of the deliverables transfers to you after the 12-month minimum term and full payment of all invoices — see code ownership & handoff for the contractual specifics and what migration off Solagon hosting looks like at the end of the term.

Training

If your team needs training to operate the new system, we include 1–3 hours of sessions in the launch phase. Larger systems where multiple roles need training (admins, content editors, customer service) get a separate training plan negotiated during discovery.

The first 72 hours after launch

We watch closely. If anything goes wrong, we want to be the first ones to see it, not the last.

• Error tracking dashboards on screen at launch
• Synthetic monitoring on critical user flows
• Daily summary email to you for the first three days
• A live channel (Slack, Teams, email — your pick) for anything urgent

Most launches don't surface anything dramatic. The few that do, we catch fast — usually before customers hit the issue.

The retainer continues

There isn't a separate "post-launch retainer" to sign — it's the same retainer the engagement was on, now in its operational phase. About a week after launch we have a check-in call to walk through how the first 72 hours went, what the site is doing in analytics, and what's queued for the first ongoing-updates cycle.

Where to go next

Ongoing retainer → Code ownership & handoff →