Website Launch Checklist: 12 Things to Do Before Launching Your Website
CONGRATS, you’ve put in all the hard work to build your website, and you’re finally ready to launch it… Big kudos to you because not everyone is able to reach this far!
We know that you’re super excited to show the world your hard work, launch your dream business, and start selling your products or services… but hold on a second! Before you go live there are some things you need to check to have a successful launch.
We often see entrepreneurs launching their websites without doing the final checks, and let us be totally honest that is never a good idea nor the way to go! Launching a website with major flaws will damage your credibility, people will not want to stick around for long nor buy from you, and you will for sure be missing potential clients.
Trust us when we say that it’s better to wait, check everything in advance, and only then launch your website. So in this blog post, we’ve compiled and we’ll be sharing a list of the 12 things to do before launching your website…
Website Launch Checklist: 12 Things to Do Before Launching Your Website
THE IMPORTANCE OF HAVING A PRE-LAUNCH WEBSITE CHECKLIST
This is probably your first time building a website, so remembering all of the tasks you need to cross off the list can become overwhelming… this is where a checklist comes in handy!
Instead of trying to remember everything that you need to do before the launch, a checklist is all you need. You just need to go through all the items and you will feel much more confident for the big day.
Let’s dive into all the items you need to cross off the checklist to have a perfect go live…
CHECK OUT THIS POST:
12 Things to Do Before Launching Your Website
PROOFREAD
This first step looks pretty simple and obvious, right? Of course! You’ve read your copy over and over again, and you’re 100% that there are no mistakes. But, have you also asked someone else to read it? You may have reviewed, and read everything over 20 times but we can guarantee that if you have someone else proofreads it, something will pop up.
This is a very important step that you don't want to skip, someone else NEEDS to read through it. Ask a family member or a friend, the person who reads it is not important, as long as that person is not you.
PRO TIP: A tool that we find super useful for proofreading is Grammarly, this tool reviews spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity, engagement, and mistakes in your writing. The best part is that the basic version is totally free!
MOBILE-FRIENDLY
The second step is making sure your website design is mobile-friendly. We cannot express how important this step is, and how often people forget about it. Mobile traffic has been increasing rapidly, did you know that around 50% of people visit websites from their mobiles?
Designing websites for mobile traffic is no longer a nice-to-have option, it's paramount. You need to have a website version that looks good and functional on a mobile device. And yes, Squarespace is really awesome because it automatically creates a mobile-friendly version of the website you designed, but you still need to check it and make sure everything looks good.
LINKS
Broken links are one of the worst things about user experience. Why? Think about when you navigate a website and there’s a broken link, what do you do? Probably, you’ll close the page and never return to that website again. So, the third step is checking all the links on your website, and making sure they actually go to the correct place. Don't forget to check all the links on your main navigation, footer navigation, forms, pages, and images that are linked.
FORMS
We know that we’ve been saying that all steps are important, and they are. But this one is really important! Ensure that your forms are working correctly, send test emails from all the forms on your website, to make sure you don’t miss contacts from potential clients. If you don’t have this functionality working correctly, you will have potential clients trying to contact you with no success!
URL SLUGS
What is an URL slug? The URL slug is the part of the URL that indicates what page you are on. Let’s take www.brandsetgrow.com/portfolio as an example. This is our portfolio page URL, and the “/portfolio” part is the slug.
While in the web design process the slug name automatically gets assigned, so you should pay special attention to this because you may end up with numbers or strange letters in your URL slug, for example “/portfolio-2” instead of “/portfolio”.
PRO TIP: If you forgot to change the URL slugs when you were designing change them now, but make sure to check all of your links as they may be broken.
SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, it is a term introduced to define the improvements that people do to their websites to make them rank higher as possible on a Google search page.
When working on your Search engine optimization (SEO), it’s important to fill every single field SEO-related. This is an important step in helping your website rank higher in search engines. SEO related-fields include titles, meta descriptions, image titles, SEO titles and descriptions on blog posts, etc.
PRIVATE POLICY
It’s a legal requirement for you to have a privacy policy on your website. Legal stuff can be kind of scary but it doesn’t need to if you’re just starting out. On the other hand, if your business is already quite big, and so does your website you should definitely consult with a lawyer. But for most small businesses, using websites like https://www.termsfeed.com/ or www.freeprivacypolicy.com to generate a basic privacy policy for free is totally fine.
404 PAGE
A “404 page” is a page where visitors will be redirected if they try to visit a page on your website that no longer exists. This may not be a problem now, but once your website starts to grow this will most likely happen. This is such an important page to have because it gives you a chance to help your visitors find what they are looking for and more importantly keeping them from leaving your website.
E-COMMERCE
This step is only applicable to you if you’re selling products online. Check if your shop has all the products, product descriptions, product prices, products images, and ultimately that is up and running, and ready to take orders! Test it by buying a product yourself and make sure the process went smoothly. If you’re using Squarespace, you can test everything without having to make a real purchase, you can simply test purchasing a product.
IMAGES
If you are just starting out having images that aren’t done by a professional photographer is fine for now. But what about images with bad quality like pixelated images? That’s a BIG NO! Images with poor quality make you look unprofessional and untrustworthy. If you don’t have great pictures use stock images for now.
Related post: 7 Websites for Copyright Free Stock Images.
FAVICON
Your website icon or favicon is the little icon that appears next to your website title in the browser tabs, bookmarks, etc. Your favicon should be square, and somewhat basic, like a single letter or symbol. This is very detail-oriented but these are the little details that have the potential to help you build your credibility online, and look more professional.
TEST, TEST, AND TEST AGAIN
Finally, the last step in your website pre-launch checklist is to test your website over and over again from start to end. Testing multiple times may seem like a waste of time, but we can guarantee that is not. This step will help you make sure that your visitor’s journey, once they land on your website, will be smooth.
Put yourself in your visitor’s shoes and test multiple paths they can take when visiting your website. Click around and make sure everything is working, check again for broken links, missing content or images, coding issues (if applicable), and so on. Make sure you pay extra attention to important actions your visitor is likely to take, like forms, sign-up for a freebie, booking a service, or purchasing something.
PRO TIP: Remember to test on different devices - laptop, smartphone, and tablet.
If everything looks good, and nothing breaks you should feel ready and confident to launch your website!
Final Thoughts
We hope all the information we shared on this post was helpful and gave you some peace of mind for the launch day. Again, make sure you double-check everything and follow the guidelines we gave you before launching your website. If you have any questions feel free to contact us or schedule a free consultation call, we'd love to help you!