Most webinar disasters are avoidable. They aren’t the “impossible to predict” kind. They’re the mundane, entirely foreseeable ones: a presenter’s slides won’t share, a registration confirmation email never sent, nobody assigned to monitor the chat, the recording setting was never turned on.
Here’s the checklist we run before, during, and after every session. Steal it. If you’re planning further out than a single session, our guide to building a 12-month webinar content calendar covers how to line this up across a full year.
Two to three weeks before
- Confirm the topic and the single primary outcome the session is meant to produce (a specific decision or action, not just “awareness”)
- Confirm speaker(s) and get their availability locked for a dry run, not just the live session
- Build and test the registration page: every field, every confirmation email, every calendar invite
- Set up tracking so you can attribute registrations back to their source (email, LinkedIn, paid, partner)
- Draft the promotion plan and schedule, including how many touches, across which channels, and starting when
One week before
- Run a full dry run with every presenter, covering audio, video, screen share, slide transitions, and timing
- Confirm who is running the session technically. It shouldn’t be the presenter; someone needs to own tech so the speaker can focus on delivering
- Prepare the reminder email sequence (typically 3 touches: one week out, one day out, one hour out)
- Draft the Q&A moderation plan, covering who’s watching the chat, who’s fielding questions, and what happens with questions you can’t answer live
- Prepare the no-show and attended follow-up email drafts now, so they’re ready to send within hours of the event ending, not days
Day before
- Send the final reminder
- Reconfirm speaker availability and tech setup. Has anything changed, such as a new laptop, different wifi, or travelling?
- Test that the recording setting is actually turned on. This one sounds obvious, but it’s the single most common live-event mistake
- Prepare backup slides and notes in case of a screen-share failure
Day of, before going live
- Presenters join 15 to 20 minutes early for a final tech check
- Confirm recording is running
- Confirm chat moderation and Q&A ownership is assigned to a specific person, not “whoever’s free”
- Have a backup connection plan (mobile hotspot, backup device) ready for the presenter and the technical host
During the session
- Monitor chat continuously. Don’t let questions pile up unanswered until the end
- Track engagement signals such as poll responses, chat activity, and questions asked. This is your lead-scoring data
- Keep timing visible to the presenter without interrupting them (a simple messaging channel works)
- Have a specific, named next step ready to share at the end, not “reach out if interested”
Within 24 hours after
- Send the recording and follow-up to attendees, with one specific takeaway, not just a generic thank-you. See our breakdown of the exact follow-up sequences we run for subject lines and timing
- Send a separate, tailored follow-up to no-shows
- Flag high-engagement attendees, meaning specific questions, staying to the end, or clicking links, to sales
- Start pulling clips while the session is fresh. See our guide on repurposing webinar content for the full breakdown
Within a week after
- Publish the first round of repurposed content, such as clips and one or two social posts
- Review attendance vs. registration rate, and engagement vs. past sessions, to see if this is trending up or down
- Debrief with the presenter on what landed and what didn’t, while it’s still fresh
Why this matters more than it looks like it should
None of this is complicated. That’s exactly why it gets skipped when a team is stretched. Every individual step feels optional until the one week it isn’t, and the failure is visible to your entire audience in real time. A checklist this specific is the difference between the tech mostly working and nothing breaking live, and the second one is what actually protects your brand’s credibility with an audience you spent real effort getting into the room.