Do you know that about 150,000 websites go live every day? Yet to your surprise, most of them fail to make it big?
Launching a website of your own could be overwhelming! It is something that you would have dreamt about for long and finally, you are there. With your content, products, and services, you are ready to broadcast your unique ideas to the entire world.
But hold on!
Before you start your website, do you think it is a complete website and has everything that a user expects?
Here’s an ultimate website launch checklist 2020 dedicated to all the new entrepreneurs, businessmen and internet marketers who want to take their business online or just start something new.
When launching a website, there’s a lot of thought process involved. Mere catchy words on your website or SEO-friendly fonts and images won’t work.
A lot of bloggers, businessmen, and entrepreneurs try to kick off their businesses online in the form of a website. However, only a few of them are actually able to make it a professional website that not only goes hand-in-hand with their brand but helps them offer the same quality services they do offline.
Creating a website needs patience and time. It is not an overnight process and expecting it to blow up. You have to build parts of it, piece by piece, considering every possible element that goes into the design and construct it into the most beautiful product you have ever made.
It could seem hectic for a starter to build a website, and that’s why I would be showing you exactly how to get started.
To begin with, you need a website launch checklist 2020, which I am going to provide you here.
A website launch checklist 2020
Before you launch your website, I recommend you go through some of the following wordpress website launch checklist 2020 here:
1. Build a proper website
Before you even think about launching your website, you might want to ensure that the content you’ve put on the pages is proper. So, what do I exactly mean by ‘proper’?
The content is the backbone of your website. Unless the content over it doesn’t entice the audience, you won’t be able to get conversions at all. This includes all the bloggers, companies, or businesses.
When you are promoting a product or a service on your website, the message should be clear.
To make sure your audience understands what your website is about, start with making a beautiful homepage. After that, you can work on the navigation of the website so that the audience understands where to go next.
After everything is done, that’s when you can call your website ‘proper’.
2. Ensure your website is mobile-friendly
There are about 3.9 billion people globally who use the internet. And out of them, 2 billion people access the internet through their smartphones only. That’s about 51% of the entire users that access the internet through their smartphones.
This is a huge number, which means your website would also need to make sure it’s mobile-friendly.
While designing a website, the primary goal is to make it PC-friendly. But that’s not all.
Since there is a significant number of people who browse the internet through their smartphones only, you need to make sure your website is mobile-friendly as well.
3. Ensure browser compatibility
Loading up your website from your browser alone doesn’t help. When you are in it, you go all in. Since people are going to visit your website from different sources, you would want to make sure that it’s compatible with every common browser people use.
I recommend you set up your website in such a way that it supports every browser. A lot of features and plugins which a few designers use won’t be supported by common browsers at times.
So whenever you are installing a plugin or feature, ensure that it’s supported by every browser. Try visiting your website in incognito mode in every browser so that you don’t miss anything at all.
4. Run a compatibility checker
A few times, plugins aren’t able to work with each other and usually end up messing the design or any such element of your website.
You don’t want that by any means. To eliminate even the slightest chance of compatibility issues, you can use testing plugins like PHP Compatibility checker in your WordPress website and ensure that it works properly in the presence of different plugins.
5. Make sure the navigation of your website works
Under no circumstances would you want your visitors to be confused about where to go next on the site.
Ensure proper navigation on your website so that no user finds it hard to search for something.
As a part of navigation, you can also maintain different pages on the header and footer of your website so that the users can access different segments of your website rather than searching for everything step by step.
6. Have a Contact page
It goes without saying that you need a contact page for your website by all means. Just consider it a small gateway for your customers to contact you in case of any queries or questions.
If a user isn’t able to get in contact with the support in case of an issue he’s facing, he’s most likely going to find an alternative for the services you are providing.
Having a contact page also adds credibility to your website and makes you look authentic. I recommend having one for sure.
7. Check all the Permalinks
A great feature of platforms like WordPress is that you can customize your permalinks entirely.
If you are creating pages or posts on your website, you have the option of customizing the permalinks or create something that is more unique to you, particularly SEO-friendly.
WordPress offers a unique feature of customizing permalinks. All you have to do is to go to the settings of your WordPress dashboard and edit the permalinks as per the requirement. All you have to do is set up the links and just forget about them.
8. Have an SEO plugin in place
I don’t reckon any of the website owners that want a website that is beautiful, creative and perfect in every sense, but isn’t SEO-friendly.
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a brilliant way of telling search engines like Google to list your website among the top search results for a particular keyword.
And in case you don’t have SEO on your site, you are probably going to lose a significant amount of traffic.
SEO is a vast topic and I won’t cover that here. But, I can tell you that your website could get ranked if you have the right plugins for SEO.
One of the most common and top-rated SEO plugins is ‘Yoast SEO’. Since you want your website to be ranking among the top results, I suggest you install it to make your website SEO-friendly.
9. Add Social Share properties
When users find your content interesting or worthwhile, they might want to share it with the people they are connected to on the internet. The medium for this is social media.
Bloggers and marketers can earn a huge amount of traffic from social media sharing. Whenever you are creating a blog post or devising a particular service within your website, having social share buttons is probably one of the most important things.
You won’t see any site that’s without social media sharing buttons because even the website owners know that they can generate a huge amount of traffic through social media.
10. Build a Favicon
If you don’t know by now, a Favicon is a little logo that appears before the website address in the address bar of a browser.
So, how does it matter?
Well, a Favicon creates a distinction between websites. A favicon represents the website, just like a logo. It is a clear shot for branding and is really easy to set up.
You can easily build a Favicon of your choice, integrate it in your WordPress or other platform and brand your website.
Note: Since Favicons usually have very fewer customization options and space, you might want to keep them minimal and beautiful.
11. Be visible on Google
A common mistake that most of the website owners make is that they don’t set up their website to Google indexing. And if that isn’t done, you are going to lose a lot of traffic.
The indexing makes your website visible in Google for the visitors. The same could be done for different search engines if you want to reach out to more audiences.
For submitting your website to Google, you would have to set up your website properties in Google Search Console. After that, customize every part of it in the dashboard only.
12. Proofread the content on your website
A lot of website editors don’t have the feature of good grammar and spelling checkers for you to write content that’s free from any grammatical mistakes.
And since you are taking your website seriously, I suggest you double-check your content before you publish it.
Show it to the people and experts around you. Try to get as much feedback as possible and evaluate any of the suggestions that you get.
In case you want a good and thorough content in the long run that doesn’t have any grammatical mistakes, I suggest you start using services like Grammarly that provide you a great online thesaurus.
This ensures you don’t give in to grammatical mistakes in your content and come out as an amateur.
13. Have an admin email address
When you make a WordPress account, you would have to enter your email address. This is your admin email address, one of the most important things to log in to your WordPress dashboard and manage your website.
This email address is also great for letting people get in contact with you.
In case people want to connect to you, involve you in deals or simply reach out for branding purposes, this email address is going to help them connect to you.
This entirely makes your website professional and lets people get closer to you as well.
14. Remove all the unnecessary posts, pages or plugins
When you are setting up your website, there is a lot of material in the form of posts and pages that you won’t be needing once you are done.
So, what to do with these elements?
Simple, just delete them! All the unnecessary plugins or pages make your website slower and remove the professional essence from your website. You definitely don’t want Google to be indexing your dummy text, do you?
15. Take a backup of your website
Since you are done with all the important parts of website designing, it’s time you save it. And by saving, I don’t mean just saving an HTML file in your PC.
Usually, when you publish a site, one or the other thing is bound to mess up. And most of the time, you don’t get the exact feature you wanted to build.
In this case, you can revert your website to a draft and update it again.
Taking a backup is a great idea. Save one in a cloud just in case an uncertainty occurs.
CONCLUSION
As you are done with these things, I am pretty sure you can call your website complete.
With this website launch checklist 2020, you get to know every element you have to take care of before you launch your website.
After you are done with these things, there’s still a lot more to do with your website and for that, I recommend you stay updated with our website for the best tips to grow your traffic and reach out to a larger market with your business.