When launching a new website for your business, it’s tempting to hit the Publish button before you’re ready. You want to get traffic going to your site, but impatience can cause you to overlook critical errors. Before you go live with your website, you’ll want to address any potential issues. Even if someone else is building your site, you still need to review everything. This is your digital storefront and you want it to be the best it can be.
Here’s a great pre-website launch checklist to look over before having your site go live.
Content Checks
Have you finalized your content? It can be difficult to proofread your own work so ask someone else to edit your content. Here are some of the things you’ll want to have them look over:
- Filler or dummy text left from the template
- Duplicate pages or large slabs of duplicate content
- Grammar and spelling errors
- Misplaced or poor quality images
- Problems displaying content on different screen sizes
We also recommend having a content calendar created for your blog if you plan to have one – which you should! This will help you start churning out content for your audience.
SEO Checks
After the content, you’ll need to take a closer look at your SEO. SEO is a broad term that refers to how you optimize your site to ensure it can be found by users and the search engines. You’ll regularly update your SEO, but for now, there are some essentials that should be in place.
- Optimize titles, URLs and meta descriptions
- Use custom title formats
- Download the plugin Yoast
- Consult the Search and Social option in your preview menu
- Verify your website on Google and your social accounts
Security Checks
After spending all this time and money on your website, the last thing you’d want is for it to be compromised. Start with a strong password and turn on two-factor authentication to make sure no one else can access your admin panel. We also recommend installing security plugins and double checking user roles to control site access.
Link and Form Checks
The final step is to make sure that your navigation is working as it should. This means checking your links and forms to see how users will interact with your site. If your links point to 404 pages and your forms are difficult to use and send, people won’t find value in your site. Look at things from a user’s point of view and assess where you can make things simpler.
Once you check off all of these things, you’re ready to launch your site! Magna Technology is hands-on with our clients and we continuously review and test for perfection. Contact us today for a free quote on a new website.
