Website Launch Checklist: 7 Things You Need Before Going Live 

Congratulations! You’re about to launch your website. It’s an exciting moment that marks the culmination of all your hard work and planning. But before you hit that “publish” button, there are a few tasks you need to do, and a website launch checklist can help. 

With a website launch checklist, you can ensure your site is fully optimized for visitors and search engines while avoiding common mistakes. 

1. Plan Your Website Pre-launch 

Why this matters: Ensuring the basics guarantees a successful launch. 

Before you build your website, you have to plan out your goals. Your objectives include defining your target audience, researching competitors, and choosing the right hosting provider and CMS (content management system). 

Here are a few things to consider during the pre-launch planning phase. 

Define Your Website’s Goals and Audience 

Start by listing your goals for creating a website. It can be generating leads, selling, informing, or building a community on your own site. From there, start visualizing specific outcomes such as increasing brand awareness, sales, or leads. However, you should also consider your ideal visitors’ demographics, interests, needs, and online behavior. 

Research Competitors and Keywords 

Analyze websites within your industry to uncover design trends, popular features, and potential opportunities. Identify your main online competitors and evaluate their website designs, features, content, and overall user experience. Determine their strengths and weaknesses, noting what they excel at and where you can improve their offerings. 

Conduct keyword research by brainstorming broad terms related to your industry or niche. Use keyword research tools for relevant keywords, search volume, and competition. Identify keywords your competitors are ranking for to find opportunities in search engine results. 

Choose a Reliable Hosting Provider and CMS 

Select a reputable hosting provider with robust features, reliable uptime, and excellent customer support. Make sure it has enough storage space, bandwidth, security measures, and scalability for your site. 

Aside from hosting, choose a CMS fit for your skills and comfort level. Look for features like SEO tools, design flexibility, plugin availability, mobile responsiveness, and readily available support resources. 

Ensure Your Branding (Logo, Colors, Fonts) is Consistent 

See to it that your website’s design reflects your brand identity through consistency with logo usage, color scheme, and typography across all pages. Here are some tips you can follow to do that: 

• Prominently display your logo in key areas like the header, favicon, and footer. 
• Choose a consistent color palette aligned with your brand guidelines. 
• Choose fonts reflecting your brand personality and maintain consistency in font usage throughout the site.
• Use high-quality images and videos blending with your brand aesthetic and create a positive user experience.  

2. Optimize Your Technical Setup 

Why this matters: A technically prepared website prevents errors, improves performance, and enhances user experience. 

After planning your website, it’s time to start building it. But before doing so, it’s important you ensure your site is technically optimized. This includes ensuring a secure connection, optimal website speed, and a mobile-friendly interface. 

Here are a few things to check off your list: 

Performance and Structure 

• Optimize website speed: Compress images, leverage caching, and set up a CDN (content delivery network) to improve your site’s loading speed. 
• Ensure clean URL structures & SEO-friendly permalinks: Use clear and concise URLs that search engines can understand easily. 
• Set up a secure HTTPS connection (SSL certificate): Provide data encryption through an SSL certificate to ensure safe browsing for users. 

Compatibility 

• Check mobile-friendliness across different devices: Build a website that runs well on every device. Use mobile-friendly tools: Use tools like Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test; it can assess your website’s mobile compatibility. 

Pro Tip: Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to identify areas for site speed improvement. 

3. Refine Your Website Content & Design 

Why this matters: A polished design keeps visitors engaged. 

A clean design and well-written content can draw users in and encourage them to explore your website. This includes ensuring all your pages are complete and error-free, your navigation is intuitive, and your calls to action (CTA) drive conversions. 

Content 

Ensure all pages have complete and error-free content by checking for typos and broken links, while ensuring your site’s style and text reflect your brand. Proofread everything and consider using tools like Grammarly or the Hemingway Editor to polish your writing before launch.  

Consider also the different types of pages your website might need, such as a homepage, an “About Us” page, and a “Contact” page. For instance, your homepage should clarify who you are and what you do, your “About Us” page must define your brand, and your “Contact” page should include your contact information (phone number, business email address, postal address, and social media accounts). 

Design 

Make sure your site’s design is visually appealing and easy to navigate. Pay attention to its visual hierarchy and ensure everything is consistent, especially your website’s color scheme . 

Navigation 

Check navigation menus and internal linking for a smooth user experience (UX). Your menus should be intuitive and easy to use, guiding visitors easily through your site. You can achieve this by ordering your navigation menus correctly in the Pages panel. Check URL slugs for all pages and edit them to match page titles if necessary. 

Calls-to-Action 

Test all CTAs and ensure they drive conversions. Your CTAs should be clear and concise, prompting visitors to take the desired action. 

Legal Compliance 

Set up privacy policies, disclaimers, and compliance pages (GDPR, CCPA) so your site complies with all applicable laws and regulations. You may also consider adding a cookie banner, especially if privacy is non-negotiable for your visitors. 

4. Test Your Website Functionality 

Why this matters: A fully-functional website ensures a smooth user experience and prevents frustration. 

Before your site launch, it’s important to test all its functionality to see if everything works well. This includes testing your forms, checkout process, links, and cross-browser compatibility. 

Here are a few things to test: 

• Test forms, checkout processes, and lead capture elements: Make sure your forms are easy to use and that they are submitted properly. 
• Ensure all links work (use Broken Link Checker): Look for any broken external or internal links and fix them immediately. 
• Cross-browser testing (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, Mobile): See if your website looks and functions correctly on all major browsers. 
• Check for 404 errors & set up 301 redirects: Consider creating a custom 404 error page and make sure all 404 errors are redirected to it. 

Pro Tip: Use BrowserStack to test how your website looks on multiple devices & browsers. 

5. Setup Your SEO & Analytics 

Why this matters: Search engine optimization (SEO) ensures your site is discoverable from day one, and analytics help you track its performance and make improvements. 

SEO is essential for attracting organic traffic to your website. Before you launch, make sure you have a solid SEO strategy in place. This includes setting up Google Analytics and Google Search Console, submitting your XML sitemap, and optimizing your images with alt text. 

Here are a few things to do: 

• Set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console: Google Analytics tracks your website’s traffic and user behavior, while Google Search Console helps you monitor your site’s performance in search results. 
• Submit an XML sitemap: A sitemap is a file that lists all the pages on your website. Submitting it to Google and Bing helps them crawl and index your site more efficiently. 
• Ensure the site contains the correct robots.txt file (allow Google to crawl the necessary pages): The robots.txt file tells search engines which pages they should and shouldn’t crawl. Ensure it’s set up correctly so that Google can crawl all the important pages on your site.
• Optimize images with alt text and compress them for faster load times: Alt texts are descriptions for images used by search engines and screen readers. Compressing images reduces their file size, which improves your website’s loading speed and helps with on-page SEO.  
• Add structured data for rich snippets (FAQ schema, breadcrumbs, product schema, if applicable): Structured data is code that assists search engines in understanding your website’s content. Adding structured data helps your website appear in rich snippets, which are enhanced search results that include additional information. 

Pro Tip: Use Screaming Frog to check for duplicate meta tags, missing alt text, and broken links. 

6. Ensure Security & Prepare Backup Measures 

Why this matters: Security prevents hacks, data breaches, and downtime that costs your reputation, time, and money. 

Make sure you have security measures in place before you launch your website. This includes installing a security plugin, enabling two-factor authentication, and scheduling automatic website backups. 

Here are a few things to do: 

• Install a security plugin: A security plugin protects your website from malware, hackers, and other security threats. 
• Enable two-factor authentication for login security: Two-factor authentication further secures your login process with another layer of protection (code, text message, or biometrics). 
• Schedule automatic website backups (daily or weekly): You should arrange for frequent back-ups to prevent website data loss.
• Prevent spam attacks & enable CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test) for forms: CAPTCHA is a test that prevents spam submissions on your forms.  

7. Monitor Post-launch & Promotion 

Why this matters: Your site launch is just the beginning. Ongoing monitoring, promotion, and optimization will help it succeed even further. 

After launching your website, you have to monitor important key performance indicators (KPI) such as site’s traffic, bounce rate, and user behavior to identify areas for improvement. Moreover, you need to continue increasing public awareness by promoting your site through various channels. 

Here are a few things to do: 

Performance Monitoring 

Regularly check your site’s traffic to understand how many people visit, what pages they view, and how long they stay. You can do this with Google Analytics and Hotjar to monitor website traffic and user behavior. 

You also have to monitor your bounce rate, which is the percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page. Moreover, analyze user behavior to see how people navigate your site, what they click on, and where they encounter problems. 

Promotion 

Promote your site through various online and offline channels to reach a larger audience and drive traffic. The following are various avenues to promote your site to more people. 

• Social media: Share your site URL on platforms like Facebook, X (Twitter), and Instagram. Create engaging posts and stories that link back to your site.  
• Email marketing: Send out email blasts to your subscribers announcing your new site and highlighting its key features.  
• Content marketing: Create engaging and informative content that resonates with your target audience, like blog posts and infographics. Distribute it across different online platforms to draw visitors to your website.  
• Paid advertising: Use social media ads and platforms like Google Ads for more audience and website traffic. 

Optimization 

• SEO performance: Monitor your website’s SEO performance and tweak your content to improve your search engine rankings. 
• User experience: Resolve any early user-reported issues to ensure a positive experience for your visitors.  
• A/B testing: Conduct A/B tests on landing pages and conversion elements to identify the best-performing versions.  
• Content refinement: Refine your content strategy based on visitor behavior and make sure it’s always up to date. 

Pro Tip: Set up automated reports in Google Analytics to track progress without manual effort. 

Ensure Your Site’s Performance from Day 1 

Launching your website is just the first step. Growth happens when you keep on improving its many aspects, such as SEO and audience engagement. If you follow this checklist, you’ll be well on your way to creating a successful website that achieves your business goals. However, having the right tools and resources can make the process smoother and more effective. 

Web.com offers a comprehensive suite of services created to help businesses grow their online presence. From website building and hosting to security and SEO, Web.com has tools and support to help you succeed online. 

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