Add site launch confirmation step

[richtabor]

Description

Introduce a confirmation step when customers select the “Launch site” button in the WordPress admin bar.

This will reduce unintentional launches, make launching a site a meaningful milestone, and create a timely opportunity to highlight premium features that align with this monumental moment.

Launching a site is a milestone—not just a task—marking the transition from building to publishing. Currently, it's superficial because it’s too easy to launch without understanding why or what launching truly means.

It's literally one click and one follow-up notification, as seen below:

CleanShot.2025-01-24.at.12.15.49.mp4

Requirements

1. When selecting the admin bar "Launch site" control, a confirmation step renders (both on the front-end and in the admin).
2. This should inform the customer what launching means and provide call to actions to launch and a secondary option to indicate they are not ready—perhaps, "Not yet".
3. Copy and the upgrade call to action should be relevant to the user's current plan—i.e communicating why a customer on a free plan should consider upgrading now to a personal plan, and premium customers to a business plan.
4. Customers on a Business plan should not be asked to upgrade their plan to Commerce.

Copy suggestion:

Launching makes your site real.
Share your work, connect with your audience, and take the next step toward your goals. Make your launch count—upgrade to add a custom domain, stats, and additional customization.

Launch / Upgrade & Launch / Not Yet

[richtabor]

Noting that this could be a modal, or perhaps something even simpler, contained within the admin bar item:

[richtabor]

It's worth noting that there is currently a post-launch domain upsell, when launch is triggered in Calypso (but only when triggered from the Launch pad task, not from the /view/$domain page):

Side-note: is it "custom address" or "domain"?

[nuriapenya]

@richtabor 👋🏼 bringing the message from Slack, here:

to clean up the launch flow and make launching more meaningful (not so much of a vanity metric).

I really like this. Especially the fact “Launch site” will always be accessible, no matter where you are. And since it’s also visible in the frontend, the Launchpad can keep the “Preview task”.

I quickly mocked the two options you mentioned.Some thoughts/ideas:

• I feel the modal is the most expected behaviour. “Launching” a site is a bit thing, so users will expect a confirmation step before that.
• It also offers more room for possible upsells (right now I just mocked the text you shared, but we could explore surfacing the domain url more prominently, etc.
• The second approach is the most feasible and quick to implement. It could also be used as a permanent “quick link” to add a domain or upgrade plan since they are always present on the masterbar. Something we never experimented with.

screen.2025-01-27.at.14.12.47.mp4

Not sure about the notice as the only medium to confirm users the site has been launched. Easy to miss. Also, in core we don’t have this badge of “Coming soon” right? I kinda miss a way to quickly show the status of the site. (Launched / Unlaunched)

Small detail on the icon side:
The master always includes an icon for all the nav links, so we should probably be consistent with the launch, but…. we don’t have a launch icon. @crisbusquets designed a rocket icon a while ago, but is not currently in use. Maybe we can bring it now?
Some alt: Publish , Send and Seen icons.

[youknowriad]

Worth noting that right now, the button doesn't behave like shown in the initial video of the issue. The button redirects you to a wizard with some upsells (domain, plan) if you don't have these yet and if you abort, the site is not launched. Just want to share this to include this in the discussion.

The button in the "preview page" is different though, that one launches without any upsell or confirmation.

[richtabor]

The button in the "preview page" is different though, that one launches without any upsell or confirmation.

What's the reasoning behind them being different in the first place?

[youknowriad]

I don't know, what I did for the "launch button" is that I copied the behavior that existed before in the frontend launch bar. I discovered the calypso button later. I'm happy to unify, what should we do in your opinion?