This checklist identifies known risks, constraints, and assumptions before implementation begins. Its purpose is to surface limitations and tradeoffs explicitly rather than discovering them during execution.
Documenting these items creates shared understanding and prevents unrealistic expectations across planning, build, and operations phases.
Checklist Objective
Produce a documented review of known risks, constraints, and assumptions that affect how the site is built, operated, and maintained.
Preconditions
- Planning 01 — Site Purpose & Scope Definition is completed and approved
- Planning 02 — Content System & Page Model is completed and approved
- Planning 03 — Navigation & Landing Page Map is completed and approved
- Planning 04 — URL, Slug & Taxonomy Rules is completed and approved
- Planning 05 — Indexing, Visibility & Crawl Control is completed and approved
- Planning 06 — SEO Execution & Governance Rules is completed and approved
- Planning 07 — Editorial Workflow & Change Control is completed and approved
- Planning 08 — Performance, Maintenance & Lifecycle Assumptions is completed and approved
Checklist Steps
- Identify known technical constraints.
- Hosting, platform, or tooling limitations
- Dependencies that restrict configuration or performance choices
- Identify operational constraints.
- Time, staffing, or maintenance limitations
- Realistic capacity for updates and audits
- Identify content and editorial risks.
- Content areas prone to drift or inconsistency
- Content likely to become outdated quickly
- Identify SEO and discovery risks.
- Indexing delays or crawl limitations
- Dependence on specific plugins or configurations
- Document assumptions explicitly.
- Assumptions about usage, scale, or growth
- Assumptions about future tooling or workflows
- Confirm accepted risks.
- Identify risks that are intentionally accepted
- Confirm no unacknowledged risks remain
Required Output
- List of known technical constraints
- List of operational constraints
- Identified content and SEO risks
- Explicit assumptions
- Accepted risks and tradeoffs
Pause & Lock
Once approved, documented risks, constraints, and assumptions become locked context for all implementation and operational decisions.
Completion of this checklist formally closes the Planning phase. Downstream implementation phases may proceed using Planning outputs as required inputs.