A successful website launch is critical for me, and I can easily overlook important steps when the site is ready to go live. So to avoid mistakes I use this checklist when launching a brand new WordPress website.
1. Harden Security
When preparing to launch any WordPress website, security should be your top priority. There is a wide range of WordPress plugins available that cover all aspects of website security. Sucuri, iThemes Security, and MalCare plugins offer a comprehensive set of settings to protect your hard work.
2. Defend Against Spam
Spam is one of the most annoying aspects of having a popular website. It is better to deal with this before launching your website by installing a plugin to help combat spam.
3. Configure an SEO Plugin
Consider a website that is beautifully built, with all of your products and services listed and a very appealing design to entice visitors. That sounds great, doesn’t it?
But what if this website does not receive enough traffic or is not found by your potential customers? To be found on the world wide web, websites have to be made search engine friendly.
WordPress is extremely search engine friendly right out of the box. However, plugins such as Yoast SEO help improve your SEO even further.
SEO plugins will quickly assist you in adding a sitemap, as well as titles, meta tags, and descriptions for all of your website’s important pages, and much more!
4. Add Google Analytics Code
After taking a lot of effort in developing the website and launching, if you don’t know who, if anyone, is visiting your website? To assist in gathering all of this vital information, a Google Analytics account has to be set up, and add the necessary code should be added to the website.
Google Analytics enables us to see not only how many people visit your website, but also where they are coming from, what browsers they are using, how long they stay on your website, what pages they visit, etc.
5. Check Broken Links
Pages and links are frequently changed during the development process. So, it’s a good idea to double-check that your website is free of these issues before releasing it to the public.
You can use a WordPress plugin or even Google Chrome extensions such as Broken Link Checker to check all of your links are working as expected.
6. Review Cross-Browser Compatibility
Making sure your website works well in as many browsers as possible is difficult, but with the help of websites like Browserling, you can get a good idea of how the rest of the world will see your website.
There are numerous other tools available, such as Comparium, CrossBrowserTesting, and others. Feel free to experiment with them all and use the one that best suits your needs
7. Test on Different Devices
The next item on our checklist is “responsive design.”
This means the website site should look good on all devices.
Again several free tools could help with that task. The most popular and easier one is using browsers developer tool screen options.
8. Remove Unwanted Pages, Plugins, Images, etc.
During development, you’ll most likely end up testing a lot of ideas, having images or plugins that were added solely to test ideas or pass options by the client. When the site is ready to be launched, remove these unwanted items to provide a clean site experience.
9. Check Performance
Now is the time to test your website’s performance and address any issues that may have arisen. To optimize your website and improve overall loading speed, reduce server requests, and so on, one can use plugins such as WP Rocket, or Autoptimize.
10. Take Backup of Website
As we all know, even the most well-prepared person can be hampered by technical issues. So, before you launch the site, create a full backup of the website, just in case the unthinkable happens!
11. Allow Search Engine Indexing
Turning off search engine indexing, while the website is in development mode, is a common practice by developers.
Hence, make sure Search Engine Indexing is ON before launching the website so that the website is indexed by Google and other search engines.
12. Share in Social Media
Now go ahead and launch your site by sharing it on social media. While posting you can also make sure the featured image and the right text are picked by the social media.
I am confident that many of you will find the above checklist useful. Please share it on your social media and show your support to your community.
