Have you launched your website or you are working on launching your new website?
Developing a website from scratch can be a little tricky and/or challenging and you want to be sure that you are not missing out on some important steps.
Before you launch your new website, you want to make sure everything is in place and is functioning well.
The last thing you want is for people to visit your website for the first time and discover it’s not working well or there are some glitches. Nah! That’s a bad first impression you want to avoid.
In this post, we will look at some important setup tips and checklists you need to implement before launching your new website to the world.
Let’s get started!
CREATE A WEBSITE BACKUP
Backing up your website should be part of your top priority. Backups are like an insurance policy for your site.
You want to make sure that when something goes wrong especially with your hosting provider, you will always have a backup to restore things to the way they were in the first place.
There are a lot of WordPress backup plugin options available, both free and paid. They are usually easy to set up. Some of the good options are Updraft plugin, Backup Wp, BackupBuddy, and Jetpack.
Make sure any plugin you choose automatically schedules your backups and saves them to the cloud.
Some of the cloud storage are DropBox, google drive, and Amazon S3. I recommend updraft or Backup buddy because they are easy to install and store backups to more than one location.
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SECURITY SETUP
Even after backup, you want to make sure your website is safe from being compromised.
Adding strong security protocols provides even more protection against hackers. Verify your website with a Let’s Encrypt SSL (secure socket layer) certificate for your domain. If you have ever visited a web address that starts with “HTTPS”, it usually has a green padlock icon.
It means that the site is secured with SSL and whatever data being transferred to and from your site is secure.
There are also plugins to keep your site secure. Wordfence is my favorite as it provides a firewall and blocks IPs trying to manipulate your site. Limit login attempt, Loginizer, and WPS hide login which hides the default WordPress login URL are some of the nice plugins to consider.
Read also: How to Identify Fake Websites
EMAIL SUBSCRIPTION AND CONTACT FORM
The next thing you want to check is your forms (Email subscription and contact forms).
It is important to have an email subscription form connected to your website for generating leads. By having a subscription form, you can turn visitors into paying customers and reaching out to them easily through email. Similarly, every website should have a contact form where they can easily reach out to you.
Make sure your connections and form fields are working before launching your new website. You can use plugins like WPforms, contact form 7, Gravity forms e.t.c. Your journey of email marketing can begin from there. Start gathering your email subscriber list.
INTEGRATE SOCIAL SHARING AND FOLLOW BUTTONS
Don’t miss out on using the power of social media to boost your website visibility.
Social media plays an important role when it comes to gaining visibility and driving traffic to your website. Make sure people have a way to connect with your site on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Also, integrate social share buttons so visitors can share your content with their network.
If you even write nice content, a lot of your visitors can share which can lead to a viral loop. You can use plugins like Sassy social share and social icons to integrate social sharing and follow buttons.
SUBMIT YOUR WEBSITE FOR INDEXING
Next, you want to make sure your website is visible on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. To achieve this, you have to submit your website sitemap through the google search console.
This will allow Google crawler to crawl through your web page and index it. By this, when someone searches your website or content related to your web page, it will appear in the search engine result page(SERP) and you can easily get organic traffic from there.
CONNECT YOUR SITE TO ANALYTICS
Before you launch your new site, make sure you have a way to track your site’s performance. After all the work put in building your website, you want to know how many users are visiting, how they got there, where they spend their most time, and the devices they use.
Google Analytics is the standard choice if you want to track your website data. There are several great plugins that can help you integrate google analytics on your website.
Google site kit and MonsterInsights makes it easy to add tracking codes to all your pages, collect data about search results, view real-time statistics, track affiliate links and even review analytics report straight from your dashboard.
TEST WEBSITE RESPONSIVENESS ACROSS DEVICES
A lot of people are using mobile devices to browse the internet. With this in mind, make sure you know how your site will look and function on different devices such as desktop, tablet, and mobile device view.
Google chrome’s screen resolution tester is a chrome extension that lets you see how your site will look on various devices through your chrome browser.
The last thing you will want is for visitors to come to your site seeing your pages scattered or scrolling from left to right. That’s not a good impression. Visitors will never come back.
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SPELLING AND GRAMMATIC ERRORS
Of course, we all make mistakes. Poor spelling and grammar can easily make or break your site especially if you have more than one or two small errors on your site, you may lose the trust of your users and impact your business credibility.
You can rely on the power of tools like Grammarly to help you fix your spelling and grammar mistakes. You can install the chrome extension in your chrome browser and you will begin to enjoy AI-powered grammar checking assistants.
ADD COPYRIGHT NOTICE TO YOUR FOOTER
The footer is one of the last parts of your website and should not be neglected.
Adding of copyright symbol to your footer notifies and warns people that your original work is protected by copyright laws from the moment its created.
Some sites also choose to include important information such as their business address, contact information, privacy policy, and disclaimer pages.
WRAPPING UP!
There are some other setup tips to implement before launching your new website but these are just some cogent ones. So you have developed your website… Congratulations!
But getting a web page ready is no small task. Having a website checklist in place before launching out ensures that you don’t miss anything that’s important for your site’s success. Even if you have launched your site, you can still go back to check whatever you are missing out on, and you can quickly fix them.
I hope this post is helpful for you. Let me know your feedback in the comment box
