With the time, money, and effort that goes into building a new website, you probably want to see your website be the best in the industry.
Testing is often ignored and overlooked once the website is fully developed, resulting in a botched website launch, which may cost you unnecessary frustration and expenses.
Therefore, ensure that there are no issues that may cause significant problems which may need major fixing.
When launching a website, consider checking content, optimizing SEO, setting up Google analytics, integrating social media, testing a site's usability, and securing your site to prevent errors that might deter visitors.
Did you know it takes almost 0.05 seconds for users to decide whether to stay or leave your website?
Doing so can create more opportunities for your business that you just do not want to miss out on.
Read on to learn what to look out for when launching a new website.
Things to Look Out for When Launching a New Site
You never get a second chance to make a first impression when it comes to your website. Your audience's first impression can have a long-term impact on how they perceive your business.
Even though launching a new website is exciting, there is a lot to do that must not be missed, and several people need to work together as a team.
Let's take a thorough website launch checklist to help you avoid the likely mistakes.
1.Check Content
Research indicates that 38% of people will stop engaging with a website if the content or layouts are unattractive.
Therefore, before launching your website, the content must be high-quality and engaging to attract visitors.
Your designers and content writers certainly have done their best, but there still can be some errors that might have escaped their notice.
Ask other team members to proofread page content, blogs, ebooks, etc., to eliminate the mistake.
- Make sure there is not any lorem ipusm content left on the website.
- Check if all formatting, like headers, paragraphs, and CTA, is correct.
- The tone of voice of all content is consistent and aligns with the brand personality.
- Make sure the website’s text is readable.
- Free of spelling or grammatical errors.
Once you have performed the necessary content checking, start making some additional improvements. Try combining standard blog posts with images, videos, and audio or musical content.
Also, include CTA (call-to-action) buttons wherever needed to help you bring more leads.
This strategy should stretch beyond your website and encompass all online touchpoints to create a truly effective plan.
2.Optimize SEO
Besides working with building a website to make sure that your site has a great look and feel when it is launched, you should ensure your new site is search friendly.
Having an SEO-friendly website when you launch your site will save you from having to make many more changes in the future.
It increases the traffic and visibility to your site through search engines.
Here are several elements of good SEO to check before launching.
- Conduct keyword research for your business and incorporate the relevant keywords into your website’s content so that search engines can find your content and recommend it to searchers.
- The title tag should be appropriately written to explain the site’s page and encourage people to click.
- Include targeted keywords in the meta descriptions of your site that appear beneath the title tag on the search results page to help convince potential visitors to click.
- 40% of users abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Check site speed and ensure it loads faster to reduce bounce rates.
- Create an XML sitemap- a list of your website’s URLs.
- Integrate internal links to other pages on your website. These links help search engines determine your site's structure and make navigation easier for users by showing more relevant content to their search.
- Create a Google My Business page to improve your local SEO strategy.
- The URLs of pages should be short, easy to read, and contain a relevant keyword.
- Install Google Search Console that helps you track your site’s performance and organic search results and find broken links, XML sitemap, or schema markup issues.
Optimizing SEO will rank your website, making it a great asset to your business; hence, focusing on SEO at every step of website prelaunch is essential.
3.Social Media Integration
Every user has 7.6 social media accounts, and they spend around 142 minutes on social media daily.
This fact shows that social media has a chance to reach a large audience.
Therefore, create accounts for your website on social media channels relevant to your business to drive traffic to your site, result in sales, and increase brand awareness.
Add social sharing buttons on the website to make it easy for visitors to share the site on social networks.
Ensure that social media icons on the website go to the correct social pages.
Once you have the social media accounts, you can prepare a consistent strategy for announcing your website launch and promoting it.
Check the infographic for more information:
4.Set Up Google Analytics
With about 56% of all websites using Google Analytics, it makes a vital tool for digital marketers.
It is free, easy to set up, and offers necessary information about your website and visitors.
It helps track and measure your business’s traffic goals and ROI and lets you figure out exactly which strategies are working for you.
Moreover, it allows you to access the following information regarding your site’s visitors.
- Measure your website’s performance
- Check if your marketing efforts are working
- From where did your website’s traffic come from
- Amount of leads converted
- Demographic information of the visitors
- Total bounce rate
With this information, you will be able to tweak your website to improve its user experience, engagement, and conversions.
Over time this can save you money and resources and ultimately boost your revenue.
5.Test Your Site’s Usability
A website’s usability testing is a method of testing its functionality by observing real users attempting to complete tasks on it.
It is one of the essential aspects to boost your website’s credibility and conversion rate.
A well-developed user experience could increase your website conversion rate by 400%.
To ensure an effective and satisfying user experience, conduct tests to evaluate the site’s usability.
It involves asking a group of people to rate your website in terms of the quality of their experience.
- Check if the user can understand the user interface and efficiently complete the tasks without encountering difficulties.
- Check how users navigate the interface, complete the tasks, and efficiently measure how quickly they can do it. The less time they need to finish the tasks, the better your UX design is.
- Keep track of mistakes the users made while performing the tasks. Evaluate why such errors can happen.
- Determine how satisfied users are with your website.
- Ask your users to provide insights to help improve user satisfaction.
- Check your site is responsive and is easily rendered on mobile devices and tablets.
By testing your site’s usability, you will uncover how your potential customer might interact with your website and identify any other issues so you can address them.
6.Secure Your Site
Lastly, safeguarding your site is the only way to ensure it is protected from losing all the work you have put into it.
According to research,
64% of companies across the globe have fallen victim to at least one type of cyber attack.
Whether it may be phishing or malware attacks, every website is vulnerable to security threats, which means that any measure that will help to protect against this works to your advantage.
Thus, ensure that site security is in place to prevent data loss before launching a site.
- Install plugins for backing up your website.
- Use HTTPS, if a site intends to collect sensitive user data such as financial information and personal details, have an SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate.
- Ensure your CMS, plugins, apps, and any installed software are up-to-date.
- Make sure your passwords are secure.
- Invest in automatic backups
Doing this can help in case of malware attempts against the site and gives you peace of mind knowing that backups of the website are being created and stored regularly.
Conclusion
Follow these best practices to set up a new site for launch and feel confident that your marketing and metrics priorities are in place to showcase your brand identity and allow your audience to engage with you.
Even after launch, you will still need to periodically run through this checklist to ensure that everything is working as it should.
Get in touch with Searchable Design, the best web development agency in the US, to learn more about launching a new site.