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8 Things to Check Before Launching A Website

When launching a new website it can be difficult to keep track of everything you need to check before going live. This can be even harder if you have a tight deadline and you’re in a rush to get things finished.

It can therefore be useful to have a checklist of things to help ensure you’ve got all the main things covered. As such, this post discusses some of the important checks you’ll want to complete before launching your website.

Check For Broken Links

Broken links can create a bad impression of your site and the search engines may well penalize you if they find lots of them scattered around. Take the time to check that all your links are active and working – the W3C Link Checker can be useful in identifying any problems.

It’s also worth noting here that it’s important to double check that you have a helpful 404 error page – this is much better than displaying a cryptic error message to users and increases the likelihood that they will stay around on your site, as opposed to clicking away.

(Image source: http://mundofox.com/la)

Optimization of Code and Images

Another check that you’ll want to perform is how well optimized your site is in terms of the code you’ve written and the size of the images displayed on your site. You can optimize your code by minimizing the number of HTTP requests that are made and through compressing the code in your JavaScript and CSS files (check out the JavaScript Compressor and CSS Compressor).

Optimizing the size of your files is also worth doing as it can help your site load much faster and create a more engaging and responsive interaction experience for your visitors. If you are a Photoshop user, you can optimize your images via the “Save for Web & Devices” option (screenshot below).

Check Your Website In Multiple Browsers

This is one of the most annoying things about web design – you’ve just finished your lovely new design and then you open it up in another browser (normally IE6 or 7) to find that it looks a complete mess! Whilst this is very frustrating, we have to remember that lots of people still use these browsers – it’s therefore important to ensure that your site has a consistent appearance across different browsers. The main browsers that you’ll want to test your new site on include Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, and Internet Explorer 6-8.

Test The Functionality Of Your Site

Another important thing to check is that all the functionality on your site is working as expected – in particular, you’ll want to test things like contact forms, search forms, taking payments, and the ability for users to log into secure areas. You might also want to get other people to go through your site and test it out – ask them to try and break it – this may seem like a strange request, but testing in this way will help to ensure your site is rock solid before launching it.

(Make sure you test all contact forms – image source: http://www.alexcohaniuc.com/)

Install Google Analytics (Or Another Statistical Application)

You will also want to make sure that you have an analytical tool that you can use for tracking the amount of traffic you receive to your site. By far and away the most popular tool for this is Google Analytics – this is largely because of the comprehensive and detailed data it provides you about your site, and the fact that it’s free to use. All it requires is the copying some JavaScript code into the footer of your site – once this is done it will start collecting data for you.

Page Titles And Meta Description

Make sure that your page titles are displayed correctly – having something like “Untitled” as the title of your page doesn’t help when trying to get good rankings in the search engines. Having a “good” title is both advantageous from an SEO (search engine optimization) perspective and in terms of telling your readers what the page is about.

Similarly, you’ll want to ensure that you’ve got a description meta tag included for each of your main pages – the contents of this tag is typically what the search engines will display in their search results for your site.

Create A Sitemap

This is useful for informing the search engines about your site and all the different pages you have. If you’re using WordPress, there’s a simple solution – install the Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator and it will automatically create a sitemap for you. It will also update this sitemap each time you add new content and will then inform the major search engines about the updates you’ve made.

If you’re not using WordPress, you need to create a sitemap.xml file that contains details of the pages in your site and then place that file in your site’s root folder. You can use XML-Sitemaps to automatically create a sitemap for you.

Once you’ve created your sitemap.xml file, you’ll then want to inform Google about it via their Google Webmaster Tools site – this has the added benefit of providing some useful statistics about the indexing of your site including when the Google Bots last visited.

Read Through Your Site’s Content

This is very important – it’s something that’s easy to put off, but is vitally important if you want to create a good impression when launching your new site. If you have lots of typos, grammatical errors, or sentences that just don’t make any sense, it’s not going to look good to new people visiting your site.

Take the time to read through your content – also, if you have the luxury, don’t look at what you’ve written for a couple of days and then come back to it again. It’s amazing how that time away can give you a new perspective on what you’ve written and you can instantly notice areas that need some additional work.

It might also be worth getting someone else to read through everything – just to double check that you’ve not missed any glaring errors.