A New Website Launch Checklist

You have likely spent countless hours perfecting your website before its first launch, making sure every single detail is just as you want it.

21:08 01 November 2019

Finally getting to that stage where you think it is ready is an incredible feeling, but this feeling alongside the devotion to the specifics of the site can blind you to problems that might be obvious from a different perspective. The only thing better than launching after months of work is launching successfully after months of work, and this checklist is designed to help you do just that.

Visual

• Have you checked for any typos and ensured that any facts cited are from reputable sources?
  
  
  • Rookie errors in this field can massively impact your trustworthiness.
    
    
• Have you clearly displayed your contact information in a location that is easy to find from any page?
  
  
  • Are any social media accounts you have clearly displayed on this contact page?
    
    
• Have you included a copyright notice in your footer with the correct year?
  
  
• Do you have good color contrast and can your site be fully useable with a screen reader to help users that have accessibility requirements?
  
  

Functional

• Have you entered unique, consistent and descriptive meta-data for your page titles, as well as alternative text for images to help with your SEO?
  
  
• Have you created a functioning custom 404 error page?
  
  
• Are all your forms functioning correctly, and are the emails resulting from form completion being sent to the correct address?
  • Do you have a system in place to deal with forms being completed?
    
    
• Have you checked to see if your site is working across browsers?
  
  
  • Don’t just focus on Chrome and Firefox, but consider Safari, Opera, Edge and smaller browsers like Pale Moon, Vivaldi, SeaMonkey, and K-Meleon.
    
    
• Is your site fully functional on mobile (including any touchable icons), and can users easily and quickly progress through the payment page?
  
  
• Have you tailored your website to function with the careful visitors that have Javascript disabled by default?
  
  

Website Set-Up

• Have you set up your domain name and web hosting account?
  
  
  • Are they linked to your site’s infrastructure?
    
    
  • Do you have a valid SSL certificate installed? Many users don’t trust sites without SSL to handle payments.
• Have you set up automatic backups?
  
  
• Do you have any color tracking system?
  
  
• Does your txt block search engine spiders from any necessary page?
  
  

Once you have completed this long but necessary checklist, you can begin to test your site rigorously. There are online resources to help you with this, but if you haven’t set up any testing analytics and measurement tools you should do so ASAP. If you don’t know where to begin you can get a site like digivante.com to help run the tests you need to guarantee security and increase conversion rates while your site is live.

Launching a website can be a stressful endeavor, but it can be much more stressful than it has to be if you haven’t carefully gone through this checklist and then tested your site to make sure it can be used by everybody in a safe, easy and hopefully profitable manner.