Your design’s in place , domain name secured and hosting’s ready to rumble but STOP! Before you bless the interweb with your spanking brand new website here is a 5 Point Worpress Launch Cheklist to work through before going live. Let’s hit the ground running…
1. Test
This should go without saying. For the love of all that’s good test your website before it goes live! Make sure that everything works as it’s supposed to.
- Links – make sure all your links are working (navigation, calls-to-action, pop-ups etc.) and lead to their desired location.
- Forms – ensure you visitors are able to contact you. Subscribe with your own address, and ensure any thank you’s or welcomes arrive as expected.
- Preview – Test you website across a variety of browsers and responsive devices and ensure everything displays as it should.
2. Analytics
It’s important to keep track of how well you website is performing. Google Analytics is a free plugin which well help you identify which pages your visitors are visiting, how long they’re on your site, where they are from.
With this vital information you can determine which part of your website are working and which need tweaking to improve its perfomance and give you a greater return on your investment.
3. Security
To ensure the security of your website it would be wise to acquire an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate. If you have ever come across an URL that start with https: instead of http: you ‘ve already seen this in action. Hell the URL of this blog you’re reading now has one.
An SSL certificate encrypts the data sent over a server, and keeps this information secure. Whether it be a contact form, credit card details or a login – your details are safe.
Let’s Encrypt is a free way of acquiring a SSL certificate. It’s what I use.
4. SEO
To have any hope of being found on the internet you are going to have to tackle the multi headed monster that is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
Fear not, there are a number of plugins avilable that will help you slay this beast. Three of the most popular are: Yoast SEO, All in one SEO Pack and The SEO framework.
Thse plugins are designed to help you break the back of your website SEO visibility by optimising your websites code, making it easier for search engines to find your site and what it is you are trying to sell, inform your visitors.
Or to get technical they help you with page titles, meta descriptions, social media sharing, creatig XML sitemaps etc.
If you have a website and want more traffic, the answer is SEO!
5. Backup
You wouldn’t want all your hard work to go to waste now would you. It’s better to be safe than sorry. Setting up a backup is like an insurance policy should anthing go wrong with your website.
There are plenty of paid and free wordpress backup plugins around that are easy to set up and automate to a schedule, stored on cloud storage like Dropbox or Google Drive.
A good choice wold be UpdraftPlus which offers a perfectly servicable free version and paid for.
So there you have it. I hope this 5 Point Worpress Launch Cheklist has helped show you how to prepare you website for launch and ensured it hits the ground running.
