Things To Do Before Launching A Website
Once you have completed the design of your website
, you need to ask yourself if it is ready for launch. There are many things that you should check before you launch your site in the market. These things, if ignored, can affect the performance of your site. Given below is a checklist that will help you make sure that everything is taken care of before you launch or re-launch your website:
Simulate the search engines
Remember to check how your site may appear to search engines before you launch it. In order to do this, you can either use an online text browser or disable all scripts from your browser and open your site. This will help you to ensure that all the links on the site are crawlable, all the content can be seen properly and there is nothing that can block search engine crawlers on your site.
Test your site for browser compatibility
Make sure that you test your site on all the different browsers, screen resolutions and mobile devices. Your site should open properly and work well on all browsers and resolutions. If someone visits your site from a particular platform or browser and it does not open properly, then the person may not visit again.
Social integration
Social integration can help your site a great deal. If you had not done it earlier, make sure you have social integration on your site before you launch it. It should not be difficult for anyone who visits your website to visit your social profile or share your content.
Optimize images on the site
Images can make any site look good. However, many times people may opt for different kinds of short cuts to complete a site and this can affect the sites performance. You need to keep certain things in mind while handling images on your site:
Image scaling: It is important for your images to be of the actual display size. Most designers may add the display dimensions in the HTML code while developing the site. This will make the larger images appear in smaller sizes. However, this will also bring down the page load time of your website and affect its performance.
File names of images: Name your images using simple words that describe what it is about instead of a combination of numbers and characters. This will help the search engines understand why the image is there on the page and your site will show up in image search results as well
ALT text: Having an ALT text for an image will also help to make the search engine understand the context and relevance of an image on the page.
Captions: Having captions that are meaningful and rich in keywords will also be helpful.
Sitemaps
Most website owners and developers tend to ignore sitemaps. A working HTML sitemap that links to all the important pages correctly is vital for the performance of your site. You should also generate and upload an XML sitemap on your website. You should also make sure that there is a sitemap for any feeds that your site may have.
Custom 404 page
In spite of making sure everything is right, your site could have a few broken links. These can be found once you do an audit either before or just after launching your site. However, your site may develop errors as it grows. It is considered a best practice to have custom 404 error pages. Such a page will ensure that any visitor to your site does not feel that the site is closed or down. Your custom 404 page should have your sites branding and message and links to all the important pages.
Check the Meta robots tags
Meta robots tags control what the search engine bots can see on your site. They can control the links that the search engines can visit, content that they can index and what they may archive. You should make sure that your Meta robots tags are not set up in a way that prevents the search engine from crawling the content of your site.
Do an audit of disallows
It is considered best practice to disallow the crawling of the site through a robots.txt file when a site is being tested in the staging environment. Many people forget to take the disallow out before taking the site live. As a result the search engines may not be able to crawl the content on the site. If you have disallowed the crawling of the site, you should make sure that you do an audit of it and only disallow those sections of the pages that you dont want search engines to crawl.
Do a technical audit of the website
If you have been testing your site on a staging environment, it is always good to do a technical audit before you take the site live. If you fix any issues that may be there before the launch, it will help your site as both the visitors and the search engines will find fewer errors on it.
Correct any errors that may be there
Any issues that are there on the site should be corrected before the launch. Whether the site has duplicate Meta tags or broken links, correcting these will enhance the sites performance. Also, if the search engines see an error free site when they crawl it the first time, it will help to increase the sites rankings in the search results.
Test the analytics code
It is important to set up some sort of analytics tracking before you launch the site. You can use Google Analytics to do so. It is free and very simple to install. If you have set up analytics before launching your site, you will be able to track the performance of your site from the first day.
Validate your site
It is important to get your site verified on Google and Bing Webmaster tools. There are various ways to do so. You can upload a file or add a Meta tag to the home page. Verifying the website will help you track the search engines activity on the site.
Though these may seem like small things, they can help you take your site a long way if you make sure that all these things are taken care of before your websites launch. A site launch is not an easy task. There are various things that you need to look out for like errors on the site, improvements in design, tracking the early performance of the site, etc. Though it may seem like an easy thing, it is as good as a full time job.
Handling the design and launch of your site can take away a lot of your time and attention from other aspects of growing and promoting your business. One of the options that you may have is to hire a
professional web design company who can handle the design and launch of your site. The company can work closely with you and understand your business needs to develop a site that will best represent your business in the online market. This will take away a major load from you and you can spend that much more time on other business promotion and development activities.
by: Tanya Jones
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