Launching a new website can be super stressful for businesses and organizations, from the marketing and growth team down to the customer service team. Everyone in the organization including the business owners wants to ensure that the website launch is a success and nothing goes wrong before or after the launch.
To help you have a successful website launch and ensure that you have covered the necessary areas and steps needed to have a smooth launch, we have created this handy website launch checklist to help you with a smooth and successful website launch and help you hit your launch goals. While some of these tips may seem simple and even a little basic, it’s all part of the point as we want to help you make sure that you do not mistakenly overlook some of the tiniest, but important, aspects of your website launch.
Here are some of the essential things to check before you press the red website launch button.
Website Content
Your website content is what makes your website stand out among 2 billion others. This alone is a reason enough to pay serious attention to your website content and thoroughly proofread every page before your website launch.
Check your content readability: Think of yourself as a user and carefully read your written content over and over, is it easily readable? Are the details clear and understandable? Are there grammars that seem too cliche or difficult to understand? What about grammatical errors, font sizes, bullet points and paragraphs?
One important thing to check before website launch and that helps with content readability is the paragraph structure. It is important to add paragraphs to the written body of texts.
Ensure to dot all I’s and cross all T’s in your content before setting off the rocket.
Check your content style consistency: The style of your content needs to be consistent throughout your website. If you are using a distinct font, it is important that you stick to the font through the website. Add subheadings where they are needed and maintain the pattern of headings and subheadings used. For instance, if your subheadings or headings are in capitals, it is important to remember and maintain the capitalisation through the other headings and content.
Check your media contents: Images, videos, audios, ebooks, infographics, etc are all essential elements in a website which helps increase on-page time while improving user experience. What this means is that users will pay attention to these media elements, therefore, you want to make sure they are rightly done. Use the right pixels for videos and stock images where necessary.
Website Pages
It is important to check through your pages before pressing the website launch button. One important page to not neglect is the “contact us” page.
More than half of website users believe that contact information is usually the most crucial information missing from a business website. This is why it is important to have the contact page and other important pages and these pages have to be very visible and easy to access.
Website UX
The UX of your website includes every element that promotes great user experience. These includes:
Website responsiveness: This means that your site needs to work perfectly across different devices and seeing that more than half of the internet traffic comes mostly from mobile devices, a mobile responsive design should be a must-do before website launch.
Browser Compatibility: Not only do users access your site through different devices, they also use different internet browsers. Statistics has shown that Chrome is the most popular browser amongst internet users but then many people still use other browsers like Safari, Firefox, etc.
You want to check that your website loads and displays correctly in these browsers and you do this by getting different browsers and checking your website compatibility yourself.
Website Navigation: Your website must be designed for easy navigation through different pages. At no point should your website visitors be unsure of where to go or which button to click next on your website. Before your website launch, you can try moving through the different locations on your website as a casual visitor would just to be sure that navigation won’t be an issue.
Clear CTAs: Call to actions are what helps your users know what their next actions are, they also help your business boost or push users into making a buying decision. You want to make sure that your call to actions are accurate, links to the right pages and conversion paths, clear to understand and in plain sight.
Social media icons and share buttons: They may seem trivial and little but contribute to your website success and shareability. You need to ensure that your website visitors can easily access your social pages and also share your contents easily when they want.
Website Functionality
This is what makes the website useful to the users. You want to check to be sure that your website is actually doing what it was designed to do. You can do this yourself, check that the links work, check contact and payment forms and ensure that the site is ready to enter the market.
Website Plugins
There are some plugins that you may need to improve your website’s functionality, you may want to check that you have these plugins rightly installed before your website launch, plugins that can help with SEO, website health, Forms, Pop ups, etc.
Website SEO
Well, you want your website to be discoverable on search engines. You do not just want to launch, you want to be seen in the places your target audience gathers the most.
- Install your SEO plugins
- Check your links and permalinks
- Check and set up your sitemaps
- Configure your content accurately.
Take care of the legal part
Make sure you have the legal rights to your website contents, the video, images and audios including written contents.
Add your privacy pages, terms of service and other necessary rights you have on the website. And make sure that these details are accurately put.
You do not want to have copyright issues on your newly launched website.
Website Security
Keep your website secured and even have a backup in place. The Admin pages and channels need to be made as secure as possible to prevent entry of malicious bots and hackers.
Install anti-spam solutions, SSL certificate, and make sure everything is secured
Update Your Timezone
Make sure the time is correct no matter which platform you use to manage the website.
Clear out the Trash
There are always some unused elements, plugins, images, posts, pages. Clear them out and ready your site for a fresh start.
Now, you are ready to press the big red website launch button.
Remember, you can get these things done by yourself or you can buzz us at chillingdesign.com and we will fix it all up for you.
