If you read my last piece, you know I'm big on the pre-publish QA checklist. That checklist exists because I've watched every one of these mistakes happen on real launches — including weeks where the whole team worked overtime to hit the date anyway.
Here are the five I see most often.
1. Publishing without confirming the cache actually cleared
You hit publish, the page looks right in Author, and you move on. Meanwhile the dispatcher is still serving yesterday's version to everyone else. On a launch day with coordinated timing, "it's live" turning out to mean "it's live for us" is a bad surprise.
The fix: after every publish, check the page in a fresh incognito window or from a device outside the network. Make it a line item, not a hope.
2. Links that broke when pages moved
AEM makes it easy to restructure — move a page, and the old URL either redirects or it doesn't. Multiply that by a launch with dozens of new and moved pages, and you've got a 404 minefield.
The fix: run the link checker before publish day, and re-run it after any late restructuring. The pages that moved at 4pm are the ones that break at 9am.
3. Metadata and alt text treated as optional
Title, description, alt text — the stuff that gets skipped when everyone's rushing. Then the launch is live, search listings look wrong, and screen readers hit a wall of "image."
The fix: make metadata part of the authoring template's required fields, not a separate step someone does later. Later never comes.
4. Nobody checked mobile
The authoring UI is a desktop experience. Authors build for the screen in front of them. Then launch day traffic — mostly phones — sees overlapping components and cropped hero images.
The fix: responsive preview is in the checklist for a reason. Check the two breakpoints your analytics say matter most, every time.
5. The page went live without sign-off
This is the process one. Someone publishes directly because the workflow felt slow, the approver was out, the deadline was real. Sometimes it's fine. Sometimes marketing sees a headline they never approved.
The fix: workflows only work if the path of least resistance goes through them. If people are bypassing approvals, the workflow is the problem — simplify it until going around it is harder than going through it.
None of these are exotic. That's the point — launches don't usually break on hard problems. They break on the boring stuff nobody wrote down.
I turned my full pre-publish checklist into a 38-page playbook — Adobe Experience Manager Simplified. It's the checklist I wish I'd had on day one, expanded with the content-operations templates I actually used.
What would you add to this list? I read every comment.
