It’s exciting to launch a new website. After weeks or months of design, development, and adding new content, you might be in a rush to get your website live. However, it’s important not to rush some very important steps. The following are five things you should do before you launch your new site.
1. Review your checklist
When you began the initial discovery phase for your website, you likely came up with a checklist of things you’d need your website to have. Before the website goes live, it’s good to double check everything important has made it onto the site. Some ideas of what you might want to include on your checklist are:
- Using SEO best practices
- Optimising image size
- Including contact forms and using the right email addresses to receive form submissions
- Making sure your content is error-free
- Ensure links are correct
- Ensure your videos and images load correctly
2. Set up analytics and any other accounts
It’s easy to gather lots of data about your website without doing much work. Enabling Google Analytics before your launch will help you evaluate how your website is performing now and in the future. Setting up analytics so that you’re measuring website traffic as soon as your website launches is a great idea to make sure you don’t have to go back and make changes later and ensure you can keep a record of all historic data.
At the same time, it’s a good idea to check to make sure you’ve claimed all of your listings (e.g. Yelp, Google My Business, Bing) and created social media accounts using your brand name.
3. Plan your future content strategy and update
Websites require maintenance both to stay functional and useful. Before your website is even accessible to visitors, you might want to consider creating a regular calendar for website maintenance and for your marketing strategy. When you create your content or marketing strategy, it’s good to include things like blog posts, social media posts, new pages you plan to create, and any other SEO or marketing tasks you’d like to make sure you do. Getting ahead of this can make it easier to stay on track once your website is live.
4. Double check everything, including functionality
You don’t want any surprises when your site goes live, so before it does, make sure you double and triple check everything. Some of the main things to check include:
- eCommerce functionality (e.g. payment, adding things to shopping carts, etc.)
- Security (making sure your website is secure for visitors)
- Product pages
Some of these items might already fall under your general review checklist, but it can’t hurt to be sure you have considered everything.
5. Make sure someone can be available for support around the time of launch
If you follow the above steps, chances are you’ll have a smooth website launch. However, it’s helpful to have someone on standby in case something doesn’t go as planned. You can chat with your web developer to come up with a plan of how you’ll tackle any issues that arise during the week of your website launch.
Thinking of launching a new site? Digital Bridge can help. We’re a web design and web development company based in Melbourne. You can reach out to us at hello@digitalbridge.com.au or give us a call at +613 8658 2434.