Launching websites is hard, 60% of websites fail to launch on time. Deadlines are crunch times, and the 11th hour is the worst moment to introduce chaos. Small mistakes have a way of snowballing. Are your caching settings consistent? Is everyone’s development database up-to-date? When your team is working overtime, little snags can kill you. The Pantheon Launch Team launches several large enterprise sites every week, and supports hundreds of self-serve customers daily. They have helped marketing teams launch hundreds of sites and they have seen it all. Learn their secrets to success: 7 best practices and tools for rooting out problems and doubling site performance by launch day What causes 80% of website slowdowns and other problems How to benchmark website performance and capacity When to automate the launch prep — and when to call on an expert pair of eyes Download A Perfect Launch, Every Time.

1. A PERFECT LAUNCH EVERY TIME
11 COMMON SIGNS A WEBSITE LAUNCHED
BEFORE IT WAS READY:
11 UGLY TRUTHS1.
Why invest time to create a perfect launch?
It’s simple. The process of planning a perfect launch keeps you from having an ugly one.
Here are some common signs a website launched before it was ready:
1) Tens of thousands of visitors see a blank page
2) Your site times out when it’s featured on the Huffington Post
3) An old version of the site gets accidentally uploaded
4) A feature you thought was locked in gets deleted
5) You get a few viral Facebook links and the house of cards
comes tumbling down
6) No one can figure out where the bottleneck or bug is
7) Your website is really unstable
8) Your developers are making last-minute infrastructure
changes the night after launch day
9) Total system failure
10) People see error messages whenever they try to log in
11) #!#%#
Steps to Avoid
the Worst Day
Of Your Career

2. LAUNCHING A WEBSITE SOON?
We don’t want to scare you. But website launches
don’t have the best reputation.
In fact, smooth launches are the exception rather than the rule. 60% of
websites launch late. Many overrun their budgets. Great-looking sites
fail to perform as expected. The worst-case scenario happens. Mystery
slowdowns, overwritten work, bugs. Thousands of potential customers
become missed opportunities. Beware of the ugly launch.

3. A PERFECT LAUNCH EVERY TIME
11 common signs a website launched
before it was ready:
11 UGLY TRUTHS
Why invest time to create a perfect launch? It’s simple. The process of planning a perfect
launch keeps you from having an ugly one. Here are some common signs a website
launched before it was ready:
Tens of thousands of visitors see a blank page
Your site times out when it’s featured on the Huffington Post
An old version of the site gets accidentally uploaded
A feature you thought was locked in gets deleted
You get a few viral Facebook links and the house of cards comes tumbling down
No one can figure out where the bottleneck or bug is
Your website is really unstable
Your developers are making last-minute infrastructure changes the night after launch day
Total system failure
People see error messages whenever they try to log in
#!#%#
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10
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4. A PERFECT LAUNCH EVERY TIME
WHAT DOES AN UGLY
APPLICATION LOOK LIKE INSIDE?
It looks like a big, thick band in New Relic. Visitors experience this as slow response.
PHP Database Web External Memcache
App Server Response Time
4
10k ms
8k ms
6k ms
4000 ms
2000 ms
0 ms
01/29 01/29 01/30 01/30 01/30 01/30
16:00 20:00 00:00 04:00 08:00 12:00
Deployed Untested Code
6,000ms
Average
Response Time Increase

5. WHAT’S INSIDE:
This book shows you how to design the perfect
launch, every time. Activating a solid plan now
means you can do more than simply prevent poor
website performance—you can double it in time
for launch day.

6. A PERFECT LAUNCH EVERY TIME
It’s not every day you launch a website
(Unless you’re the Pantheon Launch Team)
PANTHEON LAUNCH TEAM
After launching 100’s of sites serving billions of pageviews, our team of Drupal and
WordPress experts has developed a time-tested, repeatable system for rooting out
potential problems and improving—and often doubling—your site’s performance.
You’ve already hired a team of top developers and designers. Give them the
systems and checks your website needs to become professional-grade.
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Scott Massey
Ricky Pugh Brian MacKinney Merrick Clark
Suzanne Aldrich Timani Tunduwani Jessi Fischer

7. 7 STEPS FOR A
PERFECT LAUNCH, EVERY TIME:
1. Gather your cross-functional team. (page 8)
2. Start preparing 30 days before your launch. (page 9)
3. Don’t improvise. Use best practices. (page 10)
4. Assess your launchability with an automated Launch Check. (page 11)
5. Load test to simulate a day in the life of your website. (page 12)
6. Check your caching settings. (page 13)
7. Measure & celebrate your performance improvements. (page 14)

8. A PERFECT LAUNCH EVERY TIME
1. GATHER YOUR
CROSS-FUNCTIONAL TEAM
A perfect launch is a team effort. Who’s on your cross-functional team? Project managers,
developers, and business owners must have a transparent meeting of the minds. You’ll
need to sync up more in the beginning. It’s worth it. The Launch Team can be your
objective third-party to coordinate the onboarding process, monitor progress, and alert
you to potential website performance issues along the way. Use a platform like Pantheon
to see the progress of your project, along with who’s committing what code.
Afraid of enduring 30 days of irrelevant status meetings that
go on too long?
Don’t be. Standup meetings are standard in agile development. We bring them to the
process of preparing for your launch. After the initial kickoff call, most meetings take less
than 10 minutes.
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9. A PERFECT LAUNCH EVERY TIME
2. START PREPARING 30 DAYS
BEFORE YOUR LAUNCH
A site launch gets complicated fast. If you don’t plan ahead and schedule tasks like
importing data from multiple sources, batching data in the right chunks, and indexing
search results, you risk time-outs, errors, and poor performance. Our recommended 30-day
pace is brisk, but not breathless. There’s plenty of time to correct issues, but not enough
time to lose momentum.
A Perfect Launch Prep includes:
• Benchmarks - Benchmark your site performance. We run site load tests to
simulate live traffic.
• Recommendations - We make recommendations for site performance
improvements including caching.
• Monitoring - We add site-level monitoring to augment our platform monitoring.
• Enable - We enable database replication and multiple distributed application servers.
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10. A PERFECT LAUNCH EVERY TIME
3. DON’T IMPROVISE.
USE BEST PRACTICES.
Is launching a website art or science? Maybe it’s a little of both. When you work with
evidence-based experts (like the Launch Team), you don’t need to improvise solutions on
the fly. You can leverage lessons learned from thousands who have gone before you. In our
experience, 80% of websites have the same problems. Our automated Launch Check can
quickly identify issues so you can fix them before they become problems.
For a foolproof launch, we recommend checking:
3 Drupal caching settings
3 Codebase and file size
3 Database structure
3 Modules, including duplicate/missing
3 Non-standard code structures
3 Views caching
3 Watchdog logs
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11. A PERFECT LAUNCH EVERY TIME
Assess your launchability with an automated Launch Check
4. IS YOUR WEBSITE LAUNCH-WORTHY?
Caching settings, database structures, problems
with modules on your site. If you’re not a DevOps
expert, it’s easy to lose sight of the details in a
big launch. Before you know it, you’ve stepped
in a landmine and your team is manually putting
out fires on the live code or database. That’s why
the Launch Check runs an automated checklist
to rule out problems and ensure optimal
configuration, then gives you an actionable report.
We run an automated Launch Check for the
most common problems. Your results are
then carefully reviewed by experts. Together,
we’ll establish a baseline so you can make
adjustments and measure your improvements.
Learn more about Launch Check.
Visit: https://www.getpantheon.com/product/
launchcheck
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12. A PERFECT LAUNCH EVERY TIME
5. LOAD TEST TO SIMULATE A
DAY IN THE LIFE OF YOUR WEBSITE
Why load test? Because you want to know how your site will perform in real life. Do you have
the capacity for a typical day? What happens when a traffic spike stresses the site? The best time
to start load testing is before you write your first line of code, to establish a baseline. Then you
should do it incrementally during development, and again prior to launch. Ideally, you want your
developers to perform the load test in your live environment. Pantheon makes that part easy.
Load testing tools we recommend include Apache Bench, Apache JMeter, Load Impact, and Load
Storm. Don’t forget to check your logs.
Here’s a sample load test report.
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13. A PERFECT LAUNCH EVERY TIME
(Dynamic page generation is no one’s friend)
6. CHECK YOUR CACHING
Believe it or not, your website needs a caching strategy to launch perfectly. Dynamic page
generation may be the default, but it’s not acceptable! Without a proper front and back-
end caching strategy, your site will wheeze and creak into action at every web request. Your
site visitors won’t know why, they will simply give up. It turns out that unique visitors were
straining the system at every point along the chain. You didn’t have a caching strategy. The
cache isn’t simply a switch to flip. There are several kinds of caches at various points along
your stack. We pay attention to all of them, making individual recommendations based on
your goals and priorities.
Types of caching we check:
• Opcode Cache (APC, Zend OPcache, eAccelerator)
• Backends (Memcached, Redis, MongoDB, file system, APC)
• Front-end caching (Varnish, Squid, reverse-proxy CDNs)
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14. A PERFECT LAUNCH EVERY TIME
(No robots allowed)
7. MEASURE YOUR IMPROVEMENTS
Empathetic humans should review your site after it goes live to make sure it’s working
as planned. Any doubts? Put the Launch Team on the case. We don’t stop monitoring
and gently suggesting improvements until everyone on your team is confident that
perfection is imminent.
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15. A PERFECT LAUNCH EVERY TIME
Compare a site that’s configured well with one
that’s configured badly
COMPARE THE DIFFERENCE
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Let’s start with what a bad configuration can mean in terms of performance.
Starting with a Drupal 7 site, we ran 10,000 requests to the homepage using Apache
Bench. The badly configured site was producing one PHP notice and warning in the
theme layer. The correctly configured site produced no errors.
558ms
Average
800 ms
700 ms
600 ms
500 ms
400 ms
300 ms
200 ms
100 ms
0 ms
17:00 17:30 18:00 18:30 19:00 19:30 20:00
Response Time Decrease
Configured Correctly
App Server Response Time
PHP Database Web External

16. A PERFECT LAUNCH EVERY TIME
The right configuration doubled performance
RESULT?
Bad Configuration: errors
Load Time: 20 min, 52 sec
Requests per second: 7.98
Time per request: 626.192 ms
Good Configuration: no errors
Load Time: 10 min, 25 sec
Requests per second: 15.99
Time per request: 312.780 ms
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17. A PERFECT LAUNCH EVERY TIME
Go live. With confidence.
LAUNCH DAY!
All those last-minute custom fixes on launch day and the days
after? They don’t happen. Our expert website support engineers
guide you from prelaunch to high fives, including traffic and
launch planning, a Launch Check, training and more. It’s included
in all Enterprise & Pantheon One plans.
WHAT COMES NEXT?
When you have a website, every day is launch day. New traffic
streams. New features. New products. Updates. Security and
module updates.
Learn how Pantheon can streamline the way you
build, launch, and run your website.
Visit getpantheon.com
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18. YOUR WEBSITE WILL LAUNCH.
HOW IT LAUNCHES IS UP TO YOU.
Choose your own adventure:
Door #1: Forge ahead with development
Door #2: Take 30 days now to set up your website for a lifetime of success
#2#1

19. A PERFECT LAUNCH EVERY TIME
Forge ahead with development
DOOR #1:
(NO PESKY AUDITS, MEETINGS, & CHECKS TO STAND IN YOUR WAY)
Follow the status quo and proceed as usual, cross your fingers, and hope for the best.
Don’t plan ahead or take proactive steps to ensure a successful launch. Your sysadmins
are pushing code directly to production and making database changes? Let them. The site
looks great. What could go wrong?!? This is no time to rock the boat.
Two days before you launch, a critical bug emerges. No one knows the cause. You pay your
team overtime to troubleshoot this and 37 other issues. Each of these problems could have
one or multiple causes. Is the problem in the database? Somewhere in the log? An issue
with your backend systems, performance, security settings? A version control issue? Your
caching? You won’t have the leisure to troubleshoot when your site is live and featured on
the Huffington Post. The site may look good, but a respectable developer wouldn’t touch
your code with a ten-foot pole. Unusable, error-prone, very insecure. Come launch day, it’s
go live or die trying. The outcome? Expense, delays, stress.
How it all ends: UGLY LAUNCH, LAST-MINUTE SURPRISES
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20. A PERFECT LAUNCH EVERY TIME
Take 30 days now to set up
your website for a lifetime of success
DOOR #2:
Assemble your Launch Team now, give them a proven course of action, and prepare for
success. Your launch is just the beginning. Beginning 30 days before you plan to go live, you
begin a battle-tested, smooth, streamlined, agile process with proper deployment, testing,
QA strategies. Root out problems before they have a chance.
By investing some time up front in planning and project management, you’ve liberated
your website and your team from problems. Time spent sharpening the ax now will
serve you in the days before and after you launch. Launch with confidence. It’s smooth,
streamlined, and perfectly coordinated. High fives all around.
How it all ends: A SMOOTH, CLEAN LAUNCH WITH NO
SHOWSTOPPERS LURKING UNDER THE SURFACE
Real-life example: The New Republic
(Read the story: https://www.getpantheon.com/blog/how-to-have-an-awesome-drupal-
enterprise-website-launch-Pantheon)
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21. Developers can claim their free Pantheon account at
www.getpantheon.com. Invite your development team in
seconds. Pantheon’s power tools and best practice workflows
are free to use for as long as your site is in development. After
you launch, monthly pricing starts at $25.