From registered to live: the domain launch checklist

The six steps

• 1. Register the name where you want it to live long-term — ICANN’s 60-day transfer lock makes registrar regret expensive.
• 2. Point DNS at your host (A/AAAA or CNAME per your host’s docs; apex and www both).
• 3. Get HTTPS working and forced — certificates are free everywhere now (Let’s Encrypt, or automatic on platforms like Cloudflare, GitHub Pages, Netlify, Vercel).
• 4. Decide the www question once: pick apex or www as canonical and redirect the other, so links and analytics don’t split.
• 5. Set up email — at least free forwarding, plus SPF/DKIM/DMARC before anything important sends from the domain.
• 6. Turn on auto-renew and put the expiry date somewhere that isn’t your memory.

Verify like a stranger

From a clean network (phone hotspot works): does http://yourdomain.com redirect to https? Does www resolve and redirect? Does mail to you@yourdomain arrive? Five minutes of stranger-testing catches the embarrassing 90% of launch bugs.

The part that continues after launch day

Steps 2, 3, and 6 silently rot: DNS gets edited, certificates depend on renewal automation, cards expire. This is why SpargoDomains tracks every domain as Named → Pointed → Alive using real DNS and HTTPS checks — the launch checklist, kept running instead of run once.