The industry-default relationship between a design studio and a client ends the day the site ships. The invoice clears, the repo transfers, and the site is now the client's problem. What breaks in the first month is inherited unnoticed, along with whatever the launch obscured.
Every site I ship carries a launch review, thirty days after ship, at no additional cost. Site gets twelve to fifteen findings across four tiers. Site+ gets twenty to twenty-five findings across six. Both are delivered as a PDF I write myself, using a framework I run on every site regardless of scope.
The review is the studio's product-completion ritual. It is not a separate product. It is not a maintenance retainer. It is what the studio does to make sure the site is actually the site I promised, thirty days after everybody stopped watching.
Why four tiers
Most site reviews collapse into a single dimension. Some are pure accessibility scans. Some are pure performance audits. Some are visual critiques dressed up as reviews. Each one is real, and each one misses the other three.
A launch review that only checks accessibility passes a site with beautifully-labeled buttons that nobody can find. A launch review that only checks performance passes a site that loads instantly and confuses everyone who arrives. The four tiers are the four dimensions a site actually has to work along, at ship. Missing any one is a real loss.
Tier one: Strategic
The strategic tier asks whether the site still argues what the brief said it would argue. It reads the site the way a prospective buyer would read it, cold, and checks whether the argument the buyer paid to make actually lands. This is the tier most reviews skip because it is the one that requires holding the whole engagement in your head.
A strategic finding looks like: The home page tagline positions the studio as a design partner. The services page positions the studio as a build-and-ship shop. Pick one; the tension undercuts both. Or: The pricing page assumes the reader has already read the services page. Reverse the reading order and the pricing page reads as arbitrary.
Tier two: UX
The UX tier checks whether the site actually moves a reader from arrival to action. Flow, information architecture, form friction, CTA hierarchy, the shape of the funnel. This is the tier that catches the six-field contact form when a two-field form would have converted double.
A UX finding looks like: The pricing page has three primary CTAs above the fold. Kill two of them. Or: The contact form asks for budget before it asks for name. Reverse the order; the buyer commits to being here before you ask them to commit to a number.
Tier three: Visual
The visual tier is the one people expect a review to be. Typography, color, spacing, hierarchy, composition. What the site looks like, and whether the look is doing the work the brief said it would.
A visual finding looks like: The home page uses three type sizes in the hero block; a two-size hierarchy would read as intentional. The three-size version reads as drift. Or: The accent color appears in five places on the home page. Cut it to two. The eye needs a single anchor per screen, and the accent stops being an accent when it repeats.
Tier four: Technical
The technical tier looks at load performance, Core Web Vitals, structured data, image weights, cache headers, accessibility markup, sitemap and robots correctness, and every mechanism a site has for showing up in search. This is the tier the site itself cannot self-report on because a browser at ship-day cannot see what happens in Search Console two weeks later.
A technical finding looks like: The hero image ships at 1.4 MB on mobile. Serve a smaller variant; you will drop Largest Contentful Paint by 400 ms. Or: The services page has no structured data. Add Service schema and Google will render pricing in the snippet, which converts.
Why thirty days
The site changes between launch and the first month. Analytics data arrives. Real users touch it. The client swaps hero copy at some point without thinking about it. A partner adds a subdomain. The review at thirty days catches the site as it actually is, not as it was at ship.
It also lands after the client has stopped thinking about the site. They pay, they launch, they turn to the next thing. Thirty days later a PDF arrives from the studio with twelve to twenty-five findings, most of them cheap to fix, some of them cheap to ignore. The client gets a document that helps them fix the site without having to relearn the site.
What Site+ adds
Site+ adds two more tiers: Research and Accessibility. Research checks whether the assumptions the site was built on still hold — competitor moves, search-intent shifts, buyer language drift — thirty days after ship. Accessibility runs a manual pass over WCAG 2.1 AA in addition to the automated coverage the technical tier already carries, catching the touch-target and keyboard-flow issues automated scans miss.
Site+ also includes a 45-minute walkthrough call, where I walk the client through the findings the PDF cannot make land alone. The tiers are the same; the depth doubles and the delivery gets a human beat at the end.
The review is the product
This is the part most studios miss. The launch review is not a value-add. It is the studio's actual product, extended past the ship date. Every site I ship is a hypothesis about how the site should work; the review is how I check the hypothesis and hand the check back to the client.
Studios that ship and disappear are selling a deliverable. I am selling a hypothesis and the check. The tiers are how the check stays honest.