Production checklist for launch
When launching your application on Vercel, it is important to ensure that it's ready for production. This checklist is prepared by the Vercel engineering team and designed to help you prepare your application for launch by running through a series of questions to ensure:
Define an incident response plan for your team, including escalation paths, communication channels, and rollback strategies for deployments
Familiarize yourself with how to stage, promote and rollback deployments
Ensure caching is configured if deploying using a monorepo to prevent unnecessary builds
Perform a zero downtime migration to Vercel DNS
Implement a Content Security Policy (CSP) and proper security headers
Enable Deployment Protection to prevent unauthorized access to your deployments
Configure the Vercel Web Application Firewall (WAF) to monitor, block, and challenge incoming traffic. This includes setting up custom rules, IP blocking, and enabling managed rulesets for enhanced security
Enable Log Drains to persist logs from your deployments
Review common SSL certificate issues
Enable a Preview Deployment Suffix to use a custom domain for Preview Deployments
Commit your lockfiles to pin dependencies and speed up builds through caching
Consider implementing rate limiting to prevent abuse
Review and implement access roles to ensure the correct permissions are set for your team members
Enable SAML SSO and SCIM (Enterprise plans with Owner role only)
Enable Audit Logs to track and analyze team member activity (Enterprise plans with Owner role only)
Ensure that cookies comply with the allowed cookie policy to enhance security. (Enterprise plans with Owner role only)
Setup a firewall rule to block requests from unwanted bots to your project deployment
Enable Observability Plus to debug and optimize performance, investigate errors, monitor traffic, and more (Available on Pro and Enterprise plans)
Enable automatic Function failover to add multi-region redundancy and protect against regional outages (Enterprise plans only)
If using Secure Compute, enable a passive failover region to ensure continued operation during regional outages (Enterprise plans only)
Implement caching headers for static assets or Function responses to reduce usage or origin requests
Understand the differences between caching headers and Incremental Static Regeneration
Consider adding Tracing to instrument your application for distributed tracing
Consider running a load test on your application to stress your upstream services (Enterprise plans only)
Enable Speed Insights for instant access to field performance data and Core Web Vitals
Review your Time To First Byte (TTFB) to ensure your application is responding quickly
Ensure you are using Image Optimization to reduce the size of your images
Ensure you are using Script Optimization to optimize script loading performance
Ensure you are using Font Optimization to remove external network requests for improved privacy and performance
Ensure your Vercel Function region is the same as your origin API or database
Consider the limitations of placing a third-party proxy in front of Vercel, and notify your Customer Success Manager (CSM) or Account Executive (AE) (Enterprise customers) for guidance
Enable Fluid compute to reduce cold starts, optimize concurrency, and enhance function scalability
Follow our manage and optimize usage guides to understand how to optimize your usage, and manage your costs
Configure Spend Management to manage your usage and trigger alerts on usage changes
Review or adjust the maximum duration, and memory for your Vercel Functions
Ensure Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR) revalidation times are set appropriately to match content changes or move to on-demand revalidation
For teams created before February 18th, 2025, opt in to the new image optimization pricing to ensure the lowest cost, and review best practices.
Move large media files such as GIFs and videos to blob storage
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