The Launch Checklist Claude Runs on Your Landing Page Before You Spend a Dollar
Michael Sacca•Search "landing page launch checklist" and you'll find two genres. The first is a build guide: pick a template, write a headline, add a form. The second is a CRO wishlist that assumes you have an agency and six weeks. Neither one answers the question that actually matters at 11pm the night before a campaign launches: is this page ready, and how would I know?
We've already covered the building side — how to ship a page in minutes by wiring Claude to your own site, and how to use Claude as a QA layer that reads every ad against the page draft before it goes live. But reading ads against copy is only one check. A page can have perfect message match and still fail at launch because it weighs four megabytes, buries the form below three screens on a phone, or silently drops every submission that hits a validation error.
So this post is the rest of the checklist — the pre-flight pass Claude runs on a finished page draft, in order, before a dollar of spend goes out the door.
Why the builder can't be the QA layer
The tool that generated your page is the worst possible reviewer of it. It produced the draft, so it agrees with itself. If you asked for a page about "same-day plumbing in Austin" and the model drifted into "emergency HVAC services," it has no incentive to notice. The QA pass only works when it's a separate step with a separate job: here is the ad, here is the page, find the gap. That adversarial framing — reviewer vs. builder — is what makes the check real instead of rubber-stamp.
Check 1: Promise match, ad by ad
This is the one we covered in depth before, so here's just the shape of it: paste in every ad variant pointed at this URL and have Claude read each one against the page. Headline promises "free shipping, no minimum" — does the page say free shipping, and does it say it above the fold? Ad says "book in 60 seconds" — does the form actually take 60 seconds, or does it ask for a phone number, company size, and budget? Each mismatch gets flagged with the specific ad line and the specific page line that contradict it.
The output should be a table, not prose, so a human can scan it in thirty seconds and say "fix these three, ship."
Check 2: Load weight
Most page builders and AI generators will happily produce a page with a hero image nobody compressed, three font families, and a script tag for an analytics tool plus a chat widget plus a heatmap tracker. You can't run Lighthouse inside a chat window, but you can have Claude audit the HTML itself:
List every asset this page loads (images, fonts, scripts, stylesheets).
For each, flag: is it above the fold? Does it block rendering?
Is it the smallest version that does the job (WebP/AVIF, subset fonts,
minified JS)? What can be lazy-loaded or dropped entirely?
The pattern that repeats: a 4MB hero image doing the work of a 200KB one, and four third-party scripts where two would do. Claude won't give you a performance score, but it will hand you a punch list of everything to compress, defer, or delete before you upload. For the actual numbers, run the shipped page through PageSpeed Insights once — the AI pass gets you close enough that the score stops being a surprise.
Check 3: The mobile fold
The majority of paid social traffic is mobile, and mobile fold is where generated pages most quietly betray you. Claude can reason about the DOM: given the HTML and rough viewport math, what's actually visible in the first ~700 pixels of a phone screen? The failure modes are consistent:
- A hero image that eats the entire viewport, so the headline renders below it
- A headline that fits on desktop in one line but wraps to four on mobile, pushing the value proposition out of view
- A CTA button that's technically present but requires scrolling to reach
The fix to ask for explicitly: "rewrite this section so the headline, one proof point, and the primary CTA are all within the first mobile viewport." That's a concrete, testable instruction — not "make it better on mobile," which the model will happily nod at and change nothing.
Check 4: Form failure paths
Here's the check almost nobody runs, and it's the one that costs real money. A form that works on the happy path can still fail silently on every other path, and you won't know until you're three days into a campaign wondering why conversions look fine in the ad platform but nothing arrived in your CRM.
Claude reads the form's markup and any client-side validation and walks each path:
- What happens when a required field is empty — is there an inline error, or does the button just do nothing?
- What happens with an invalid email format — is the error message visible, or is it white text on a white background?
- What happens on submit — is there a success state, and does the success state confirm what happens next ("check your inbox") or leave the user staring at a static page?
- If the submit request fails — network error, server 500 — does the user know their data wasn't received, or have they just left and been counted as a conversion in your ad platform anyway?
That last one is the expensive one. Every silently failed submission is paid traffic you bought, converted in your reporting, and never received. Ask Claude specifically: "show me every way this form can fail without the user knowing."
Check 5: The dead-end audit
One final pass, cheap to run: trace what a user can do from the page. Every link — does it go somewhere real, or is it a placeholder href="#" that generators love to emit? Is there exactly one primary action, or does the page offer "Book a call," "Download the guide," "Follow us on LinkedIn," and "Read our blog" in equal visual weight? A landing page that's also a website is a landing page that converts worse. Claude is good at this audit because it's a reading-comprehension task, not a design judgment: list every interactive element, classify it as primary action / navigation / distraction.
Making it a step, not a memory exercise
The point of writing this as a checklist isn't that you should read it every time you launch. It's that it belongs in your publishing pipeline as a prompt. If you've built the setup where Claude publishes pages to your own hosting — whether through a thin endpoint or an MCP server as we described in "Skip the Builder: Hook Claude to Your Own Site With MCP and Ship Landing Pages in Minutes" — then the QA pass is just another call in the sequence: generate, review against ads, audit weight, check fold, trace form paths, report. The report lands in your chat with a verdict: ship, or fix these four things first.
We've argued before that your landing page should be as disposable as your ad creative — regenerate freely, version aggressively, keep only the system. A disposable page still has to be a working page, though. Disposability without QA just means you ship broken things faster.
The build step is automated. The launch step should be too. This checklist is what "launched" means when a model does it: not "the page exists at a URL," but "the page exists, the promises match, the weight is sane, the fold works on a phone, and the form can't fail silently." Everything short of that is spend waiting to be wasted.