Before any website we build goes live, the same three things get set up as standard — not as an optional extra, and not something we wait to be asked for. None of it is glamorous. All of it is the difference between knowing how your new site is actually performing from day one, and guessing six months later when someone asks, and there’s no data to answer with.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
GA4 is what tells you who’s visiting your site, where they came from, and what they actually did once they got there — which pages they read, whether they filled in a form, whether they bought something.
The reason this goes in before launch rather than after is simple: analytics only measures from the moment it’s installed. If GA4 goes in three months after launch, you’ve lost three months of baseline data you can never get back — no way to compare “before” and “after” for anything you change later, no early signal if something about the new site isn’t working the way the old one did.
For every site, we set up:
- Basic tracking across every page, so traffic and behaviour are visible from launch day.
- Key events — form submissions, button clicks that matter, and purchases if it’s an eCommerce store — so you can see not just that people visited, but whether they did anything that actually matters to the business.
- Conversion goals, so the reporting answers “is this working” rather than just “how many people showed up.”
Google Search Console
If GA4 tells you what happens once someone’s on your site, Search Console tells you how Google sees your site before they ever get there. It’s a free tool from Google that shows you which searches your site actually appears for, how it’s ranking, and — critically — flags problems Google’s crawler runs into that you’d otherwise never know about: pages it can’t index, mobile usability issues, security warnings.
Verifying your site in Search Console on day one means any indexing problem gets caught immediately, not discovered weeks later when someone mentions the new page “isn’t showing up on Google.”
An XML Sitemap
A sitemap is a simple file that lists every page on your site in a format search engines can read directly, rather than relying entirely on finding pages by following links around your site. For a small brochure site it matters less. For anything with more than a handful of pages — a blog, a product catalogue, a multi-service business site — it’s what makes sure every page actually gets found and indexed, not just the ones a search engine happens to stumble onto.
Once the sitemap exists, it gets submitted straight through Search Console, so Google knows exactly what’s there and where to look.
Why This Is Standard, Not an Upsell
It would be easy to treat this as an add-on — something we mention exists, then leave for a client to organise separately, or forget entirely. We don’t, because the alternative is a site that launches with genuinely no way to answer basic questions after the fact: is the new site performing better than the old one? Where is traffic actually coming from? Did that marketing spend do anything? Without GA4, Search Console and a sitemap in place from day one, those questions don’t have answers — not bad answers, no answers.
What This Doesn’t Replace
To be clear about scope: this is the baseline every site gets, not a full SEO or marketing campaign. It’s the instrumentation that makes it possible to run one later, and to prove it’s working when you do — not a substitute for an actual content or search strategy if that’s what your business needs next.
If you’re planning a new site — or if an existing one was launched without any of this in place — get in touch, and we’ll sort it out.