What to do in the week after launching a website

After launching a website, make sure people can use it, make sure you’re counting who comes, then learn from the questions they ask. On launch day that means checking sign-up works on a phone, confirming your analytics are recording before you post the link anywhere, and answering every question that arrives. Over the first week it means keeping a tally of those questions, because they tell you what to fix first. Most of the rest can wait until next month.

Deacon is an AI customer support agent and website analytics in one script tag, built for founders who handle support themselves. It answers your visitors’ questions in seconds from your own docs, and counts who came, where from and whether they signed up. There’s a free plan, and it needs no card.

Before you post the link

Do these before launch day, because two of them can’t be done afterwards.

1. Turn on analytics and make sure it’s counting. Where a visitor came from is only known while the visit happens. Install it on Thursday and Tuesday’s launch traffic is gone for good, along with any record of which post sent it.
2. Tag every link you’ll share. Add a utm_source to each, such as ?utm_source=newsletter, by hand or with a free UTM builder, so visits from apps and newsletters, which often arrive with no referrer, don’t all land under Direct.
3. Sign up on your phone, in a private window, with a new email address. Then reset your password and, if you charge, pay. A broken sign-up costs you every visitor who hits it, and launch day is when you have the most.
4. Verify your site in Google Search Console and submit your sitemap, so Google finds your pages sooner.
5. Give every page a title and a description that say what the product does, because that’s what people see in search results and in many link previews.
6. Put a way to reach you on every page, an email address and a chat, so a question on launch night doesn’t end in a closed tab.

Launching on Product Hunt? The Product Hunt launch checklist covers the listing, the rules and launch day itself.

On launch day, watch four numbers

Launch day brings more figures than you need. These four tell you whether it worked and what to do next time.

• How many people came, compared with a normal day.
• Where they came from, because that’s where to spend your effort next time.
• Which page they landed on. That page is doing all the explaining, so read it as a stranger would.
• How many signed up. Count sign-ups as a goal, so you can compare sources by the share of their visitors who signed up, not only by how many they sent.

And fix what breaks before you read any of them. An error on your sign-up page matters more than every figure above.

In the first week, answer everything and keep a tally

The questions after a launch are rarely the interesting ones. They’re usually the same few, asked again and again, about what the product works with, what it costs and how to get data in or out. Answer each one yourself and quickly, above all from anyone about to buy. And keep a tally, with one line per question in the asker’s own words, a mark each time it comes back and a note of the page they asked from.

Here’s how a launch week might look for an invented reporting tool.

By Friday the top two lines are your to-do list. A question asked from your pricing page is the pricing page failing to say something. And a feature ask with a count beside it is worth far more than one you half remember. Kept up every week, the tally is a small voice of the customer programme.

What can wait until month two

Plenty of good ideas are wrong for the first week, because they help you improve something once you know where people struggle.

• Session recordings and heatmaps.
• A/B tests, which need more visitors than most launch weeks bring.
• A full help centre. Write the three pages your tally points to instead of forty you guessed at.
• A status page and a public changelog.
• Funnels with many steps. One goal, a sign-up, is enough for now.

How Deacon covers launch week

Most founders end up with neither the tally nor the traffic data, because covering both usually means two tools, two scripts and an afternoon that launch week doesn’t have. Deacon does both from one script tag.

Paste the tag before </body>, or copy the prompt on the Install page into Claude Code, Cursor or Codex, and your agent adds the tag and checks it’s live. The Install page tells you once Deacon has been seen on your real domain.

The same tag counts your visitors from the first page view. Analytics › Website shows visitors, page views, visits, pages per visit, the share who left after one page and time on site, with the pages people landed on, the sources that sent them, their countries and their devices. A source is the site that sent the visitor, such as google.com, or the tag on the link, such as a utm_source you set. Product Hunt tags its links with ref=producthunt, so its visitors show as producthunt. A visit with no referrer reads Direct. Mark your sign-up button with data-deacon-goal="Sign up", and every source is rated by the share of its visitors who signed up.

Worth knowing, under the chart on that page, spots your launch by itself. When a day brings more than three times your usual day’s visitors, and more than 50 of them, it says so and names the source that sent most of them, in a line such as “producthunt sent 412 people on 15 to 16 Sept.” If that source was Direct, it gives the day’s total instead. Once you have a sign-up goal, it adds the share of that day’s visitors who signed up, against the share on other days. It also names a new JavaScript error once ten people have hit it.

The same tag puts Deacon in the corner of every page. It answers visitors in seconds, at any hour and in their own language, from the docs you gave it. When your docs don’t cover a question, it says it doesn’t know and asks for their email instead of guessing. If they leave it or ask for a person, the owners on your team get an email, and your reply from the dashboard appears in their chat if they still have it open.

And it keeps the tally for you. Topics group the questions that mean the same thing, count the people who asked and label most of them as a how-to, a feature ask, a bug report, a pricing question and so on. Each conversation shows the page the visitor asked from. Every question your docs didn’t cover has an Answer this button, and each answer you write becomes part of what Deacon knows, so it can answer the next person who asks. The more you answer, the less it needs you.

Every feature is on every plan, and no plan limits page views. Website visitor tracking goes through what the analytics side counts.

Questions about what to do after launching a website

How soon should I read the numbers?

Look at launch day once it’s over, then wait a full week and compare it with the week after. The day tells you which source sent people. The week tells you which sources send the visitors who sign up.

Do I still need Google Analytics?

Not for week one. If what you need is visitors, sources and sign-ups, Deacon’s website analytics has them. Google Analytics does much more, such as ecommerce revenue, audiences and ad reporting, and the two can run side by side. Google Analytics alternatives compares ten, with their free plans and cookie rules.

What if launch day brings more questions than my plan covers?

A busy launch can use up the free plan’s answers, but nothing is billed past them and every conversation stays in your dashboard to read and reply to. The Product Hunt launch checklist covers what visitors see once the answers run out, and when to move to a paid plan before the day.

Does the script set cookies?

Yes. It sets one called deacon_visitor_id and keeps the same id in local storage, so a chat can follow a visitor from page to page. Page views are counted without it, from a hash that changes every day. List both in your cookie policy.

I built my site with an AI tool. How do I add Deacon?

Each of these builders has a page with its own steps, Lovable, Bolt, v0, Replit and Base44. If you’re still choosing one, the best vibe coding tools ranks nine, and Base44 vs Lovable compares two of them. On any other site, the guide to adding a chatbot has the code, and the install guide covers the dashboard. Bolt.new pricing and v0 pricing cover what each charges once your app is live, credits included.