What happens between sign-off and DNS swap

Day 13 ends with a sign-off: you've walked the staging site, approved it, and we freeze. Day 14 ends with your site live. The 36 hours in between look like nothing from the outside. They're the most engineered part of the whole two weeks.

The freeze is real

After sign-off, nothing changes that isn't on the launch checklist. No 'while we're in there' improvements — every late change is a fresh chance to break something nobody will re-test. The discipline is boring and it's the reason launches are boring, which is the goal.

The checklist, roughly

• Full link crawl and form test on staging — every form fires its real workflow with a test record, then test records get purged.
• Performance pass: images sized, fonts preloaded, Lighthouse run on the slowest pages, fixes applied.
• Redirect map for every old URL that has traffic or backlinks — a redesign that drops its old URLs burns its own SEO.
• DNS staged with low TTL the night before, so the actual swap propagates in minutes, not hours.
• Analytics verified receiving from production, not just staging.

Launch is before lunch

DNS swaps in the morning, on purpose — it leaves a full working day to watch the site under real traffic. By 5pm you have the Loom walkthrough and ownership of every account. The project ends with you holding the keys, not with our invoice holding them.