Tips for a Successful Website Launch

You’re about to launch a new website—CONGRATS! The work that goes into this long and sometimes daunting process is not lost on us. Having undertaken this many times, we’ve narrowed down a few key takeaways that are crucial for successfully launching a website. 

When you have your site designed and developed with MADE, we love to make it an interactive experience. Having our clients involved in every step of the process can help keep important milestones on everyone’s radar along the way. Since we like to think of ourselves as an extension of our clients' team, we’ve found that providing a visual sitemap, content templates and checklists help to keep us all working toward a common goal. This approach has proven time and time again to aid in a successful website launch. 

We want to make sure you’re armed with some insightful and helpful information, so we’ve put together a checklist below to help ensure that your website launch is a success.  

Domain and Hosting
You won’t get far without either of these! You’ll need to have both in order for visitors to see your site on the internet. Your domain is your website address. We recommend keeping it short and easy to identify as your company. Too far of a departure from these can make it difficult for people to remember. Your host is who is actually housing your files and making them visible online. Hosting tip: look for a company that provides you with a quick-response service, runs regularly scheduled back-ups of your site, and keeps an eye on backend maintenance and all those pesky plugin updates.

Test Website on Different Devices
During the development process, it's important to test your site on various browsers and devices. Internet users visit sites from a wide range of devices, from large desktops (both MAC and PC) to tablets and smartphones. You never know from which device or browser a user will interact with your site, so be sure to test as many as possible.

Proofread the Site
Check for grammar and spelling mistakes on all pages. Nothing stands out like a misplaced apostrophe or misspelled word. 

Configure SEO Plugin
Search engines like Google send thousands of visitors to the website if it is made search engine friendly. Helpful tools can improve SEO, like Yoast SEO. This tool offers both a free and premium version. The premium version allows multiple keywords and keyword phrases, so it’s worth the annual fee. SEO plugins are also great for helping you quickly add a sitemap, or make changes to the title, meta tags, and descriptions for all your pages.

Title & Meta Tag All Important Pages
As mentioned above, plugins like Yoast SEO can help you easily optimize your page titles and meta tags for better search engine optimization, helping you more readily appear in search results and provide custom snippets to attract users to your content.

Remove All Unwanted/Unused Items
Be sure to remove all unused plugins, images, pages and posts before launch. Leaving unused items on the back end of your site increases page load speed times. Slow page load is frowned upon by Google, as well as your website visitors, leading to high bounce rates as folks leave your site because it’s taking too long to load.

Test All Forms
Be sure to test all the forms on your site to ensure they are working properly and routing to a correct and valid email address.

Add Google Analytics Code
Google Analytics offers vast insights into who is viewing your website, which pages are performing well, how long people stay on your pages and so much more. It’s free and simple to add. Just sign up and a code will be provided to you to add to your website. Let the tracking begin!

SSL Certificate
An SSL certificate, or Secure Socket Layer certificate, is very important to have on your site. Google Chrome and many other browsers are now flagging sites with no SSL certificate as "not secure" which can scare a lot of folks away. SSL certificates are available through your website host and are often at little to no cost. 

Customize Your Favicon
A favicon is a little icon that shows up before your web address on your browser tab. Most WordPress themes have these built-in and are very easy to add to your site. It’s a great way to expand your branding and makes it easy to visually identify your page in a sea of open browser tabs.

Check for Broken Links
Broken links are another thing the search engines don’t like. You want to be seen as an authority in Google’s eyes, and broken links do the opposite while also lessening your legitimacy with your users. 

Optimize Images
Beautiful images are great to have on your site, but be certain that they have been optimized for web use. Images that are too large often lead to slow page load speeds which, let's be honest, no one likes, and Google docks you for it. Tsk tsk.

Update Admin Email Address
Before you launch your site, be sure that the admin email address is going to the correct person.

Make a Website Backup
It’s a good practice to make a backup of your website and save those files. If anything ever goes wrong, or someone accidentally deletes something important, you can at least go back to the backup version of your site so not all is lost. It’s just handy—and let's hope you never need it.

Have Fresh Eyes Review Your Site
Have your friends check out the site and share feedback. It’s imperative to check on your user experience along the way. Incoming shameless plug...we’ve developed a helpful DIY Website Audit that talks more about this. 

Allow Search Engine Indexing
Search engine indexing should be turned off when a website is in development. This essentially "hides" your site from being crawled. This means it won't show up in searches before it is completely ready for the public's eyes. When your site is ready for the public, be sure to turn search engine indexing back ON so that search engines can find you. This takes us right into our last item…

Submit Website to Google
Once you’re ready to launch your site and you’ve turned on search engine indexing, you’ll want to submit your site to Google. This will speed up Google's process of finding you because you’re basically saying, “Hey Google, check me out. I’m new!”. You can log into your Google Search Console to do this or simply search “submit URL to Google” and follow the steps provided. Give it a few days and you’ll start to see your brand new site showing up in Google searches.

Now you might be thinking this list has a lot of emphasis on Google. There’s a reason for that:

Google is the most used search engine in the entire world:

...See? Told ya it was important!
(Stats from Stastita March 2020-March 2021)

Congratulations on your new website. We hope you found this list helpful and that your launch is successful! 

Remember that helpful DIY Website Audit we told you about up above? Here's another chance to download your guide to getting your website moving in the right direction.