Your site is live and secure. Before you start texting the URL to friends or posting it on LinkedIn, there’s a few things worth checking so you don’t look like you forgot to finish.

THE QUICK SANITY CHECK

Have Claude run through the basics:

Check my site before I share it publicly:
1. Does it look good on mobile?
2. Are there any broken links?
3. Any obvious typos in the homepage, about page, or navigation?
4. Is there a favicon (the little icon in browser tabs)?
5. Do I have proper page titles and meta descriptions for SEO?

Flag anything that looks unfinished or broken.

This catches the obvious stuff, but it might surface a lot of things to fix. If Claude finds more than a few issues, consider setting up a todo list to track the work across sessions.

One thing Claude can’t check from inside your project is how your site looks when you share the link somewhere.

SOCIAL PREVIEWS (THE THING EVERYONE FORGETS)

When you paste a URL into Slack, LinkedIn, Twitter, or iMessage, it usually shows a preview card with a title, description, and image. That’s powered by something called Open Graph meta tags.

If you don’t set these up, your shared links look like this:

  • Just a bare URL with no context
  • Or a generic title with no image
  • Or worse, random text pulled from your page

To check what yours looks like, paste your URL into one of these:

If it looks sad or broken, ask Claude to fix it:

My social sharing previews don't look good. Set up Open Graph meta tags so when
I share my site URL on LinkedIn or Twitter, it shows:
- The site title
- A description
- An image (create a simple one if we don't have one)

Check what we have now and fix what's missing.

WHAT’S OPEN GRAPH Open Graph is just a set of meta tags that tell social platforms what to display when someone shares your link. Facebook invented it, but everyone uses it now - LinkedIn, Twitter, Slack, iMessage, Discord, all of them.

FAVICON (THE BROWSER TAB ICON)

That tiny icon next to your page title in browser tabs? That’s a favicon. If you don’t have one, your site shows a generic blank icon or the browser’s default - it’s a small thing but it makes your site look unfinished.

Do I have a favicon set up? If not, create a simple one that fits my site's style and add it properly.

QUICK FAVICON TIP Google Material Icons has thousands of free icons you can download and use as a favicon. Find one that fits your vibe, download the SVG, and tell Claude to set it up.

SEO BASICS

This isn’t about gaming Google rankings - it’s about not looking broken when your site shows up in search results. You want:

  • Page titles that make sense (not “Untitled” or “Home | Home | Home”)
  • Meta descriptions that describe what each page is about
  • Proper heading structure
Check my site's basic SEO setup:
- Do all pages have proper titles?
- Do all pages have meta descriptions?
- Is the heading structure correct (one H1 per page, logical hierarchy)?
- Is there a sitemap?

Fix anything that's missing or broken.

WHAT ABOUT GOOGLE INDEXING? Getting your site discovered in search results (Google Search Console, sitemaps, etc.) is a separate thing from looking good when shared. It’s not urgent for launch - your early traffic will come from direct links anyway. We’ll cover discoverability in a future article.

CHECK IT ON MOBILE

You can test mobile without pulling out your phone. In Chrome:

  1. Open your site
  2. Right-click anywhere → Inspect (or Cmd+Option+I on Mac)
  3. Click the little phone/tablet icon in the top left of the panel that opens
  4. Pick a device from the dropdown (iPhone, Pixel, whatever)

Now you’re seeing what mobile visitors see. Click around, scroll through a full article, try the navigation.

If things look broken or cramped on mobile, give Claude specifics:

My site looks broken on mobile. Here's what I'm seeing:
- [describe what's wrong - text too small, things overlapping, nav doesn't work, etc.]

Fix the mobile responsiveness so it looks good on phones.

The more specific you are about what’s wrong, the better Claude can fix it. You can also take a screenshot and drag it directly into your Claude Code iTerm window - Claude can see images and it’s super helpful for visual debugging. There are even more advanced ways to do this with MCPs, which we’ll cover in Pro Workflows.

THE FINAL LOOK

Sometimes there’s a typo in your bio that you’ve looked past a hundred times, or a link that goes nowhere. Fresh eyes catch things Claude won’t.

Actually read your homepage. Click every link in your nav. Skim an article. Check it on a different browser if you can.

Once everything looks good, you’re ready. Share that link with everyone and show them what you built.

That’s it for Zero to Ship! You went from terminal terror to a real website, live on the internet, that you built yourself with Claude. If any of this helped, share it with someone else who’s curious about vibe coding.

Ready to level up? Check out Pro Workflows for slash commands, automation, and other power-user techniques.

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