A YouTube pre-publish checklist
Ten things to check in the thirty seconds before you post to YouTube.
YouTube is a search and recommendation engine as much as a social feed — metadata does real work here that it doesn't on other platforms. Check these before you publish.
- Does the title tell someone what they'll get, without lying to them? A misleading title tanks watch time once viewers realize the video isn't what it promised, and watch time is what the algorithm actually tracks.
- Is the thumbnail readable at a small size? Most views happen on mobile — test how it looks shrunk down, not just full-screen in your editor.
- Did you write a real description, not just a copy of the title? The first couple of lines show in search results and matter for discovery.
- Are your first fifteen seconds earning the rest of the watch? YouTube's retention graph punishes slow intros harder than almost anything else you can fix in editing.
- Did you add chapters if the video is long enough to need them? Chapters help both viewer navigation and search.
- Would someone who's never seen your channel understand the video without prior context? Discovery traffic doesn't know your inside jokes or back-catalog.
- Are your tags and category accurate, not just aspirational? Mislabeling doesn't trick the algorithm into more reach; it usually just confuses recommendation matching.
- Is there a captions file, even a rough one? Captions help accessibility and searchability both.
- Does the end screen or pinned comment point somewhere useful? A video with no next step wastes the attention it just earned.
- Did you preview it on mobile before publishing? Text overlays, thumbnail crops, and pacing all read differently on a phone than on your edit monitor.
Run the list, then publish — the fixes here are cheap before upload and expensive after.