A Checklist of Do’s and Don’ts Before You Launch Your Website
Your website is ready; design seems perfect, content looks great, and CMS is working absolutely fine. Working day and night on it finally paid off as client looks extremely happy with the final thing. It’s time to launch, but are you missing something critical, in your eagerness to go live?
Launching a website is like preparing a special dish, you’ve got all the ingredients, you’ve the spices, and you have a nearly perfect recipe. However, even the world’s best chef tastes it before presenting it to eaters. Does that ring a bell?
This final tasting is missing in your website, but launching a website is an extremely complicated process. There are so many things that can be easily overlooked, like a broken link or a misspelled word. Stressed? Well, you are in luck today, after months of hard work, we reinvented our website recently. We can share our findings that are critical for an ideal launch of a website in a thorough yet engaging checklist.
Design:
A recent study highlighted that users decide whether the site is worth visiting again or not, depending on the design. Only the blend of good graphics and user experience, gives user a reason to explore more areas of your website.
Compatibility: Make sure your web pages perform well in all major browsers (IE 7 8, 9 and 10, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari) and devices (Android, iPhone, iPad, Tablets, desktops and notebooks.)
404 error page: You should have a custom page to help your visitor find something else worthwhile on your website if, ‘404 Page Not Found’ error occurs. Also, try to include a provision where admin gets an email when something unexpected happens on the website, so that you can fix this proactively.
Favicons: Favicons are those little icons that display in the address bar of browser. While it’s not essential, it’s good to have branding opportunity, adding credibility to website.
Fonts: You should use standard font to give better readability. Sometimes font codes get dropped in page or letters appears out of place. Check content for consistency, formatting and odd fonts.
Images: It’s a trend to use text on the images nowadays, use the right images to maintain the text visibility and don’t forget to compress the big images to optimize loading time.
Content:
We tend to change our content multiple times during website development. With this, the content is bound to have spelling errors, typos, grammar and formatting issues across different browsers and devices. So, what bottlenecks to look for in content?
Context: Have a critical eye to check if the content is actually ready for visitor and addresses the audience requirements prompting them to visit the page again.
Content Placement: Make sure all the links are working fine, and resources like case studies, eBooks, whitepapers, images and videos are correctly displayed on all devices.
Spelling: Check and re-check every piece of content that goes on your website, look for grammatical errors and have been proofread.
Generic Content: No one will find Lorem Ipsum appealing on your company’s services page. Make sure the real content is in place and all placeholder text have been removed.
Copyright: The copyright date should be of current year and copyright owner information should be correct.
Contact details: Test if phone numbers and emails are working fine.
Functionality:
Who doesn’t like a fast website? The design and content of your website look perfect, now you don’t want to get stuck with the glitches on the functionality front. High performance site boosts both user engagement and search rankings.
Links: Don’t be under impression that all links will work. Click on internal links to check and add http:// to external website links as well. Make sure your logo links to home page. Also it’s essential for links to be obvious to even new users, they should stand out from the other content on the page.
Degradation: It easy to block JavaScript in all modern browsers, so make sure you have checked that your website still works even when the JavaScript is turned off, specially the forms that perform server side validation checks and cool AJAX stuff.
Validation: After finishing off everything on the website, use the free tools like W3 validator to make sure your site is working fine for search engine crawling spider.
Social Media Integration: Ensure that social media icons on the sites redirect to correct pages and right buttons with all social plugins installed and working.
Stress Testing: Don’t let your site crash due to increased traffic. There are tool available to test your web server performance much ahead, under both normal and excessive loads.
Performance Testing: You can use tools like google page speed or blame stella to ensure faster loading time.
CSS optimization: It’s ideal to configure your website for optimal performance; reduce HTTP requests, use CSS sprites, optimize images for web, compress JavaScript, CSS files to load pages quickly and use less server resources.
Forms: Forms are really important to capture the lead information with mandatory email address field. Fill all your website forms manually to check if they are error free and include a thank you message.
SEO and Analytics:
What is the use of creating a website that no one finds in search. SEO is a solid foundation to boost credibility of website. Site architecture, content hierarchy, metadata and XML sitemaps, everything has to be optimized to ensure complete SEO success.
Keywords: SEO helps you in attracting relevant traffic to your site by targeting right demographics and right audience. Research keywords with highest traffic potential and least amount of competition with Google AdWords and optimize title, description and content with them.
Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions: Keyword research will help you find the necessary meta titles and meta description for webpages. You can focus on a particular keyword and wrap your titles and descriptions around it in both singular and plural forms.
Image Alt-tags: Add relevant and descriptive alt-tags to all images on main page and landing pages. Also try to choose a descriptive file name instead of random words for images.
URLs: The site’s URLs should be clean and descriptive, and optimized by including a keyword.
XML Sitemaps: Make sure you have added a sitemap to your website and indexed it with Google Webmaster tools.
Analytics: Set up tracking codes, funnels and goals in the Google Analytics and marketing automation tools. Remember to exclude relevant IP addresses from analytics tracking.
Compliance and Security:
Launching a website is bound to involve certain risks, but you can reduce them to bare minimum if you plan your security checks well ahead of the website launch.
Back-up: If you are reinventing your existing website, make sure you have taken proper backup, so that you can rollback to older version in case something goes wrong.
Terms: Be conscious about the terms and conditions you place on your website. Consult a lawyer for best advice and make these as clear as possible. There is nothing worse than being baffled by legal jargons.
Privacy: You need a privacy policy if you use cookies to capture and distribute data. Keep them simple and remember to mention what data you collect with contact details. Use security protocols such as SSL encryption to protect against unwanted information theft.
Sensitive information: If you have any sensitive pages or folders on your website, make sure they are guarded from getting indexed on search engines by placing robots.txt files and exclude them from Webmaster Tools.
Intellectual Property Rights: Use content and images that are either paid or you hold necessary rights to use them.
Post Launch Will Ensure Success
Post-launch analysis is important. You have spent your time and money into this website and it’s time to know if it’s worth it. You must have set a few goals and initial benchmarks before you have designed your website, it’s time to do some before and after comparisons. Ensure announcing website launch to every possible audience within a week of launch date.
Content Strategy: Create a content calendar, start sending out emails, exploit social media, push PR’s and do a lot of blogging.
Indexing: Within a week of launch, check if your site is indexed in all major search engines, how many pages are indexed and make sure all important pages are already listed.
Webmaster tools: Submit .XML sitemaps via Google and Bing webmaster tools again after a week of launch.
Analytics: Benchmark your metrics and monitor the number of visits, visitors, unique visitors with monthly average. Check out the bounce rate and time they spend on each page and the site overall. Look out for the top performing keywords in terms of rank, traffic and lead generation.
Lead forms: Monitor the number of new leads and form submissions per month and the number of sales generated through website leads.
Analyzing all this will give you more clarity on planning your next step, further development and rolling new updates so that you can greet users with a brilliant design and amazing experience in their next visit.
Launching a new website is definitely an arduous task, but we can ease your stress with our comprehensive website launch checklist.
