As you draw closer to your launch date, you may find yourself a little overwhelmed. This is natural as you have an array of things to stay on top of. Now that you have created a spectacular logo design using an online logo maker, formulated the marketing strategy and even created a little anticipation for the website launch. This step is crucial for everyone and comes with its own challenges. No matter if you are just launching the brand or revamping with a completely new website, it can be both exciting and daunting. Therefore we bring you here a checklist to keep all your ducks in a row at the time of the website launch:
- Responsiveness of the website design
RWD or Responsive Web Design optimizes the website so that it can be viewed and navigated with ease on various viewing devices such as monitor, mobile, tablet etc. While this is not news, often this factor gets neglected and hampers not only the prospective leads but also their ranking. You can check the responsiveness of your website using Responsive design Checker. The tool also provides demo views for different variants of the gadgets for a thorough check.
- Create a favicon
When you create a logo for your business, you consider the prominent locations where the logo would be displayed. But one of the uses for logos is creating a favicon. A favicon helps create recognition and recall in the minds of the customers right from the start. Check if your website has the desired favicon.
- Check all internal links
Broken and inactive links can ruin the user experience for your website. While the most obvious consequence of this can be the loss of leads and traffic, it has a larger implied effect. Google penalises websites with broken links and their ranking position declines.
- Proofread the content
Even the smallest issues can create a huge impact on the customers. Make sure that the content on the website is not out of context, all of the dummy text has been removed. In addition to these make sure the following has been done as well:
- There are no grammatical mistakes in the content
- The headings have a consistent format (Upper Case or Title Case)
- The punctuation marks have been placed done properly such as particularly apostrophes, quotation marks and hyphens/dashes.
- Check for the content’s relevancy. Is the content informative enough to drive users to visit the website and can your target audience understand it?
- Make sure that the “Lorem ipsum dolour sit met” is nowhere on the website.
- Check the site for Hidden Copy
For every website, some text is for the benefit of the user such as the content you view on the homepage, about, contact pages etc. However, certain areas also require text for the purpose of analytics and SEO. Make sure you have entered the correct alt text for images, URLs, meta descriptions, transcriptions, text in JavaScript functions etc.
- Ensure that the images are not pixelated
Images and graphics are integral to a website and provide visual cues to the users. Make sure the images are compressed as this improves the website loading time. You can use TinyPNG in order to reduce the file. Keep in mind that all the images are of good quality and do not appear pixelated. Again make sure that all images have their respective alt texts and descriptions in order to the help with the website’s SEO. Another key factor that is often missed out are the image names, it is recommended that you keep the names of the images SEO friendly.
- 404 pages
Error 404 pages can be frustrating and appear from the deep web when you arrive at a wrong turn. At times overlooked at the time of launch. While these can be frustrating when they appear, they provide a great chance to show off your brand’s personality. You can customize these pages as you like as shown here. Ensure that you create 404 pages that can lead the customers back to the working website.
- Check for website loading time and website performance
It is recommended that you perform a stress test or load test in case sudden traffic influx can be anticipated. This will help you figure out if the website and server capacity can handle simultaneous traffic from all across the globe. You can check your website’s speed using Pingdom.
- Perform SEO check and include SSL Certification
SSL certification is vital in safeguarding a website against hacker attacks. It is now considered a part of the Google’s search ranking algorithm. Also, make sure that the keywords have been included in all the relevant locations keeping in mind Search Engine Optimization. The key to a good SEO for the website is creating URLs and linking internal pages in an SEO friendly way. Consider starting with the off-page SEO where you use anchor text and authoritative links. Another great way is to consider your competitor’s SEO profile using an online tool if the competitor has a better ranking. This should be done before the launch as it takes time for the ranking to improve.
- Install an analytics tool
In order to track the website traffic and record its performance, install a good analytics tool such as Google Analytics or Pikwik. Google Analytics even provides you with a great feature that helps create goals in order to track how much impact each conversion has on the business.
In case you are revamping or replacing an existing functional website, make sure that the data is free of the tracking code on the new website during the development phase. If you do leave the tracking code in the data, the key is to account for it while studying the fresh analytics results.
On the day of the launch be prepared for all the things that can go wrong and remember to submit the new XML sitemap to all top search engines. Now you can spread the word through social media and other marketing channels. Good Luck!