Finally, after thousands of hours working hard to develop your website, it's time to launch. But before going live, has your website finished preliminary steps?
"Don't make me think” is the first caution and also the title of a book by Steve Krug to emphasize the importance of not puzzling out the visitors. The point of your live website is to not make your visitors stop and think what and how they should do. And don't waste their time. Another seconds waiting increases your chances of losing your customers.
But it's not all about customers, you have to make sure that you double check all the issues of the website to ascertain that your website runs smoothly. Do a functional testing. Get search engines optimized. Ensure that security is set up so that no trouble will arise. Now, I'll give you a detailed web launch checklist.
Content
Grammar, spelling, punctuation
Don’t let trivial things cause bad impressions on visitors.
Intent of the page.
Who are your target visitors? What is the sole purpose your page trying to get across to the visitors?
Contact page.
Is it easy for visitors to contact you? If you use a contact form, make sure to test it.
Legal policy
Have a privacy policy, terms of use & disclaimer to protect your site content, products.
Design
Favicon
Don’t forget to have a Favicon. It’s the brand image and one of the first impressions of your site.
Responsive design
Use these tools to check your site on different resolutions: Responsinator and Studio Press
404 pages
Have a customized 404 page. Don’t let visitor escape your site because of a 404 page.
Images
Are images well displayed on normal devices and other high resolution display like Apple’s Retina display?
Fonts
Format is consistent, and make it easy to read.
Functional Testing
Forms
Are they properly working? Does the form get sent to the appropriate person? Does a thank you message or page display appears after form being submitted?
Code validation
Use this tool
Compatibility
Is your website displayed well on all popular browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE,...) & platforms?
Links
Check all internal & external links. Are they still valid? Use tool like screaming frogs to check all link status or xenu for broken links.
Redirect
Have you redirected old & broken links to the new ones? And what links needs a 301 permanent redirect or a 302 temporary?
Performance
Site speed
Site speed does affect user experience & search engine crawling. A website with less than 2s loading is optimal. Check with tools like pingdom and gtmetrix.
Page size
Minify/compress static (JavaScript/HTML/CSS) and image files for better page performance.
SEO/Marketing
Google Webmaster + Bing Webmaster
Validate your site with both tools to know your website’s status in search engines.
Google Analytics
Nuff said. A must have analytics tool for your website.
Page Title
Does the page title tell exactly the main content of the page?
URL
Have a clean URL for ease of view and to get optimized for search engines
Meta Description
Does the meta description blend in well with the page title & the content? Are they displayed well on search engine?
Sitemap
Submit a Sitemap to search engines to get your website indexed.
Social Media Integration
Do you include all of your main social networking account (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin,...)on your website?
Alt tag
Make sure all images have alt tag for search engines to read images.
Newsletter Signup
Do you have a way for returning visitors to know important events from your website?
Security
Monitor
Setup services such as Pingdom or Siteuptime tools to monitor the health of your server. Create SMS/email alerts for exception notifications and server monitoring
Back up
Configure backup schedule. What’s more devastating than losing all the valuable information but forget to back up the data in the first place?
Loading test
What could happen if suddenly your website were pressed with heavy traffic. Use tools like webperformance or load impact for testing?
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