Your Website Is Live. Now What? The First 90 Days

Here is the most common fate of a new website: weeks of work, a launch worth celebrating — then silence. The site sits untouched, identical to launch day, for years. By the time anyone looks at it again, the prices are stale, the contact form quietly stopped delivering, and the most recent "news" item is three winters old.

Launch is not the finish line. It is the start line. The first 90 days decide whether the site becomes a channel that produces enquiries every week or an expensive business card. The good part: everything below fits in two to three hours a week and needs no technical skills — just a method.

This plan assumes the site passed its pre-launch checks. If you have not gone live yet, run the 20-point launch checklist first and come back the day after.

Week 1: make sure everything is counting

None of what follows works if the instruments are off. Four checks, one afternoon:

1. Search Console verified, sitemap submitted. This free panel is where Google tells you which searches show your site. Verify the property, submit sitemap.xml, and two weeks later search Google for site:yourdomain.com. Zero results after two weeks means indexing is blocked — the most common failure a new site has, and the most silent one.
2. Analytics counting real visits. Open the site on your phone using mobile data (not the office Wi-Fi) and confirm the visit shows up in the real-time report. We regularly find sites launched with the test environment's tracking code still in place: they count zero forever and nobody notices.
3. Forms tested with a reply. Send yourself a test message and confirm it arrives. Then ask the question almost nobody asks: who answers, and how fast? An enquiry answered in 4 hours converts; answered in 4 days, the customer has already called your competitor. Put in writing who owns the inbox and what the maximum response time is.
4. Google Business Profile pointing at the new site. Updated URL, confirmed hours, correct categories. For a local business, that profile brings enquiries faster than the site's own SEO will — the complete Business Profile guide walks through every field.

Weeks 2–4: the review circuit

SEO takes months; reviews start working the following week. In local search, a business with twenty recent reviews consistently beats one with four old ones — before anyone even visits a website.

The circuit is simple: find the moment of peak satisfaction (the job delivered, the haircut finished, the problem fixed) and ask right then, with a direct link to your review page. A message you can copy and adapt:

Hi [name], thank you for trusting us! If you were happy with the result, a Google review would help us enormously — it takes a minute: [link]. And if anything wasn't right, tell us first and we'll fix it.

The honest arithmetic: roughly 1 in 3 direct asks turns into a review. A business serving 15 clients a week that asks its 5 happiest gets 6–7 reviews a month — around 20 by day 90. That is the difference between "appears on the map" and "gets chosen from the map".

These are also the weeks to fix your metric. It is not traffic — it is contacts: form submissions, phone calls and WhatsApp messages, added together. Five minutes every Friday, in a spreadsheet with three columns: visits, contacts, where they came from. Five hundred visits without a single enquiry is not a result; it is an alarm.

Month 2: the five pages your customers already asked for

Your content plan does not need a brainstorm. For two weeks, write down every question customers ask by phone, on WhatsApp and at the counter. The five most repeated ones are your next five pages.

For a service business, the list is nearly always a variation of:

• What it costs — honest ranges, even when the answer is "it depends" (say what it depends on)
• How long it takes — typical timelines, from request to delivery
• Where you work — areas covered, travel, call-out costs
• What is included — and what happens if something goes wrong (guarantee, fixes)
• X or Y? — the comparison every customer makes before deciding

Each page: 300–600 words, direct answer in the first paragraph, no wind-up. The payoff is triple: these are exactly the searches people type into Google; they save you the same ten calls a week; and they give you a link to send instead of dictating the same answer for the hundredth time.

Month 3: the first check-up — data, not opinions

By day 60–90, Search Console and Analytics are telling a story. Open both and answer three questions:

1. Which searches show the site? If impressions grow week after week, Google is building trust. If they are still zero, go back to Week 1 — something is broken.
2. Which pages get visits — and which get none at all?
3. Where do the contacts come from? The source that produces enquiries deserves more investment; the one that only produces visits does not.

Then take the step almost nobody takes: remove things. The "News" page with one article from April. The team section with placeholder photos. The service you have since stopped offering. Unpublish without mercy — a small, complete site inspires more confidence than a large, hollow one.

This is also the right moment to request adjustments from whoever built the site. What should be covered by your maintenance agreement (€30–€300/month is the normal range in Portugal): small text changes, bug fixes, tweaks to the form or contact buttons. What is fair to quote separately: new pages, new features, a redesign. And if the provider vanished after getting paid, you have just learned something important for the next contract.

The signals at day 90

Reference values for a local service business — an online store runs at a different scale, but the way you read the table is the same:

Signal	Green	Amber	Red
Google impressions	Growing every week	Flat for a month	Zero — indexing blocked
Monthly visits	Over 300	100–300	Under 100
Monthly contacts	8 or more	3–7	0–2
Contact rate (contacts ÷ visits)	2% or more	0.5%–2%	Under 0.5%
Google reviews accumulated	15 or more	5–14	Under 5

How you read it matters more than the numbers. Red on visits with everything else green is a distribution problem — solved with your Business Profile, reviews and time, not with a new website. Green on visits with red on contacts is the opposite: people arrive and do not get in touch. That points at the message, the social proof or the form — and it is a legitimate conversation to have with whoever built the site.

What this says about launch day

Most websites do not fail because they were badly built. They fail from abandonment: nobody submitted the sitemap, nobody asked for reviews, nobody looked at the data at day 90. If your site has been live for a year with none of this, nothing is lost — the plan works exactly the same starting today.

And if you are still before the start line — planning the site or choosing who builds it — pick a partner who hands over the site with the instruments switched on and a plan for the next 90 days, not just a link and an invoice. Describe your project in two minutes and tell us where you want to be 90 days from now.