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Article · Websites · 8 min read · Updated 2026-09-18

Website Production Readiness Checklist for 2026

Ship with evidence: the same themes a production review covers, checked from what the public internet can already see — then a clear list of what still needs internal ops.

Production ready is more than green Lighthouse

A fast LCP does not mean you will notice outages, catch JS crashes, or give researchers a way to report a bug. Production readiness is the ops layer beside performance and SEO.

AuditHQ’s Pro deep security scan builds a Production readiness checklist on your project page: Pass, Improve, or Fail for secrets, transport headers, cookies, API abuse posture, debug disclosure, health and error tracking, and robots/sitemap.

Checklist you can verify from the public web

1. Secrets — no live API keys or PEMs in HTML or client bundles.

2. Transport — HTTPS, CSP, nosniff, Referrer-Policy, HSTS, framing controls.

3. Sessions — Secure and HttpOnly on session cookies.

4. APIs — no wildcard CORS with credentials; rate-limit headers on observed /api responses when you expose them.

5. Disclosure — no /.git/HEAD, no production sourceMappingURL comments.

6. Health — GET /api/health (or /health) returns a clear healthy body for uptime monitors.

7. Errors — a browser error SDK (Sentry, Bugsnag, Datadog RUM, …) is loaded so crashes are not silent.

8. Trust — /.well-known/security.txt with a Contact field.

9. Crawlers — robots.txt with User-agent rules and a Sitemap pointing at XML.

10. CSP reporting — report-to / report-uri so policy breaks are visible.

What this checklist cannot see

Outside-in scans cannot prove database replicas, connection pools, backup jobs, billing budget alerts, load-balancer min/max instances, sticky sessions, or whether your React tree has error boundaries.

Those stay on your internal runbook. AuditHQ lists them as out of scope on the Production readiness card so a green ops score never pretends to cover private infrastructure.

Run it on AuditHQ

Create a website project for your production URL, run a Pro deep audit, and open Security → Production readiness.

Fix Fail rows first (secrets, HTTPS, exposed .git). Treat Improve rows as the next sprint (health route, Sentry, security.txt, sitemap).

Copy the AI fix prompt when you want a coding agent to apply the same redacted findings file by file. Re-audit until themes move to Pass.

Run this on your site

AuditHQ schedules website measurements, a deep security scan and Production readiness checklist on your own URL, waterfalls, screenshots, competitor scores, and ranked fixes.

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