Launching a new website is a key moment for any company or individual. It's the digital gateway to your brand, offering and the value you provide to your customers. However, making sure everything goes smoothly requires careful preparation and attention to detail. A comprehensive pre-launch checklist is indispensable to identify and address potential issues before they impact your users' experience. Let's take inspiration from solidpixels' essential guide to save you from unnecessary mistakes at the start of a new website.
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Content control and optimization
Read all content
Your website content is a direct communication channel with your audience. Typographical errors, grammatical mistakes and clumsy wording can undermine your credibility. Read your content carefully, or better yet, have it checked by another pair of eyes to uncover errors you may have missed.
Optimise for SEO
Make sure your content is not only reader-friendly, but also optimized for search engines. This includes incorporating relevant keywords, meta titles, descriptions and alternative text for images. Optimizing for SEO helps improve your website's visibility and ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Open Graph Settings
Social media is an essential element of SEO. In order to take full advantage of them, provide adequate information in the Open Graph (OG) to make your website appealing when shared on social media.
Design and user experience
Responsive design
Your website needs to look great and work well on all devices - computers, tablets and smartphones. Test your site on different screen sizes and browsers to ensure a seamless experience for all users.
User Experience (UX) testing
Test the user journey to ensure that navigating your site is intuitive and simple. Focus on the main goals of your site.
Visual consistency
Maintain a consistent visual theme across your site, including fonts, color schemes, and element styling. Consistency improves the user experience and strengthens your brand.
Technical control
Functionality testing
Test all forms, call-to-action buttons, navigation links and other interactive elements to ensure they work as intended. Non-functional elements can unnecessarily frustrate users and cost you customers.
Testing links
Checking links can be tedious due to the number of links on a web page. It's common to find one or two links that lead nowhere, but it's crucial to find them before customers find them. Broken links negatively impact both SEO and user experience. For a quicker check, you can use Ahrefs' link checker.
Social networks
Social media links
Include links to your social media profiles on your website to build your community on other platforms. Make sure these links are correct and lead to your profiles.
Analytical tools
Setting up analytics
Integrate all the necessary tools like Google Analytics, Google Tag Manger or Search Google Console to track your website performance and user behavior. Analytics provide valuable information that can inform future improvements and marketing strategies.
Complete checklist for your website
Use this checklist for your final pre-launch checklist to ensure your site is error-free, optimized and ready to welcome visitors.
Logo and favicon
Content
The site has the correct heading hierarchy (H1 to H4).
Images in the content have ALT (alternative caption) filled in.
The correct title (up to 60 characters) and meta description (110 to 160 characters) is set.
Open-graph attributes and social thumbnail images are set.
Test pages outside the structure are either deleted or set to "Do not show" and have "Show in search results" turned off.
Navigation and Links
Global navigation is functional and links lead to the correct pages.
All links in the content lead to the displayed pages (does not return a 404 error).
Social links are set up correctly.
Design
Colors match the brand manual.
Text color against background has sufficient contrast.
A maximum of 2 fonts are used across all settings in Design.
Responsiveness
The site displays without errors on all resolutions.
The mobile navigation has the correct graphical appearance set from within the design.
Site content is responsive and displays correctly on mobile, tablet, and desktop.
Forms
Forms have the correct required fields set.
Forms have data storage, email notifications, and exports set up correctly.
Email template uploads are set up correctly.
The user has feedback after submitting the form.
Analytical tools
Connected traffic measurement through Google Analytics.
Connected Google Tag Manger.
The site is connected to Google Search Console.
Technical settings
Pages are indexed, site visibility in search engines is enabled. Across the entire site and individual records.
Correct content on the 404 page is loaded.
Redirecting old URLs to new ones (redirect 301).
GDRP and Cookies
Cookie bar set based on analytics and marketing tools used.
Privacy and cookie usage pages created based on what data you collect.
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