Happy Tuesday! You know what that means – it’s a blog day! Today I’m taking you through my pre-launch checklist that you should always go through before a web launch. Having a pre-launch checklist is essential to launching a website without errors. Around here, we want to launch with confidence! Check out the below list to see if you can add any to your own pre-launch list!
- Proofread content — have both yourself and your designer read through the content on your website to ensure there are no misspellings, missing words, or weird spacing issues. If grammar isn’t your strong suit, you can always check on Grammarly (pro tip: install the Chrome plugin so it’s always checking for spelling and grammar as you’re writing!) or have a professional copywriter take a look before launching the content.
- Check your links — when on a website, the user journey is SUPER important to your retention rate (AKA keeping visitors on there for a long time!) If someone clicks a button, they want to be confident that it will go where it’s supposed to. Make sure all buttons/links function properly and definitely don’t forget about your navigation menu!
- Look over SEO — SEO is super important to get discovered on Google. Make sure you’ve implemented meta titles, descriptions, keywords, tags and image title tags, too! For WordPress websites, we like to use Yoast SEO for this! If you’re unfamiliar with SEO strategy, check out this blog post as a reference point.
- Make sure your website is secure — I see this on a lot of the website audits that I’ve done recently. If your website does not have that “lock” symbol beside the domain name, it’s unsecure. When it’s unsecure, some browsers will prompt a warning that “this website is not safe” which looks very unprofessional and decreases your retention rate.
- Test forms — there’s nothing worse when someone tries to contact you and it doesn’t work! Have your designer or one of your employees check your contact forms with their email and ensure it comes to your email/final location as planned.
And now you’re ready to launch! Keeping a list like this in-sight at time of launch can help smooth out any mishaps or overlooks. It might seem redundant, but we’ve all been there where we forget to check a link or proofread that one page – so learn from my mistakes, and keep this checklist on hand!
