Launching a website? Here’s the truth, your website isn’t just a virtual storefront— it’s the face of your business, where you make an impression and build credibility with your target audience. 

But what if, soon after launching, you spot a spelling mistake, a design flaw, or broken link? Even worse, you might forget to set up proper redirects, leaving important search engine visitors with frustrating ‘page not found’ messages. 

We understand that creating a website is a lengthy and challenging process, and it’s not easy to keep everything aligned without missing something. This is why having a website checklist is a must. 

This blog will guide through the essential steps and checklists to ensure you launch your website seamlessly, efficiently and successfully without missing out minor or major issues. 

What You Should Do Before Beginning Your Site Design? 

Having an attractive and engaging website is extremely important for your business success and thus, investing in your web designing project can bring tremendous profits and longevity to your organisation. 

However, if you want to do it yourself, we are here to provide you the step by step process. Hence, before we get into the creative aspects of designing your website, ensure these foundational steps that you must take: 

  1. Analyse Your Previous Website

Check the gaps or what went wrong in your existing website.  Analyse it properly and find the underlying unevenness. Understanding  your current site’s strengths and weaknesses is important because it will help you make informed decisions about the changes to be incorporated into your website. 

Ask yourself the following questions: 
  • Why do I need a new design or overhaul? 
  • What goals haven’t been achieved with the existing site? 
  • How will the new design serve the organisation better? 

These questions will help you identify the gaps in your current site seamlessly, which you can address in the new design. 

  1. Crawl Your Old Site and Document Its Structure

In order to have a better understanding of your existing site’s structure and pages you can use a tool like Screaming Frog. This will give you a concrete view of your current pages, redirects, and metadata. It is crucial if you want to create a detailed website development plan. 

  1. Obtain Benchmark Data and Confirm Testing Procedures

Collecting benchmark data from your old website is important because it comes handy for comparison. This data is helpful in measuring the performance of your new site. It establishes the testing procedures early on, thus, creating a system for tracking bugs and enhancements using tools like Google Forms for efficient feedback collection. 

  1. Identify Goals for the New Design

Once you have identified gaps in your old website, now it is time to set the proper clear goals for the new design. 

Whether it is about improving ease of use, refreshing the visual effects, or enhancing SEO strategies and user experience, understanding gaps from the old websites and correcting them in the new website will help achieve these goals without any hassle. 

  1. List Action Items, Roles, and Responsibilities

It is always good to create a project management checklist that includes all the important and necessarily required content, calls-to-action, and design elements. It is best to assign each task to an individual or team using a model like DARCI (Decision Maker, Accountable, Responsible, Consulted, Informed) to avoid confusion and ensure that everyone knows their responsibilities and is on the same page. 

  1. Buckle Up for Worst-Case Scenarios

Ask your team to identify potential issues that might arise when the website launches and hence, it is always advisable to create backup plans to address these situations. Being prepared for anything unexpected will save both time and money and will get the things done sooner and smoothly. 

  1. Select a Solid CMS

Choosing the right Content Management System (CMS) is important for building and managing your website efficiently. There are many CMS platforms out there, like HubSpot, WordPress, Wix, and Drupal, offering various degrees of customization, SEO optimization, and content management features. 

Choose one that best suits your needs and business goals. 

  1. Get on developing a consistent brand

Create a consistent brand message, tone, and visual identity. This includes your value proposition, mission and vision statements, colours, fonts, and imagery. Having consistency across these elements will make your brand more credible and memorable. 

  1. Create your technical SEO strategy

A strong technical SEO foundation is important for your website’s success. Cover everything from site architecture, XML sitemaps and content hierarchy to metadata – Everything! Perform keywords research, create a content strategy, and ensure your site architecture supports SEO. Redirect all the unnecessary pages and optimise metadata to improve search engine rankings. 

  1. Plan your conversion paths

Determine the actions you want your users to take on your website and how you will capture the information from your visitors and consumers. Plan out premium offers, call-to-action, forms, landing pages, and thank you pages. 

Also, work on establishing a system for tracking conversions and follow-up actions. 

  1. Line up analytics software

Choosing the right analytics to track your website’s performance. Decide whether you would like to use existing tracking scripts or set up new accounts. This step is essential to understand user behaviour and making data-driven decisions. 

  1. Set a launch date

After identifying all the tasks that need to be completed before launch, set a realistic launch date. Give yourself at least one month for research, design, and development. In fact, many organisations allow themselves two or three months. 

So, you have checked the above listed points before launching your new website. 
But the job doesn’t get over once the website is launched, you should have a different checklist prior to launching your new website. 

What to Check Once You’ve Built Your Site?

Once your website is developed, you should have a number of important tests before, during, and after it goes live to make sure everything functions as it should. 

Here is the website launch checklist: 

  1. Content Accuracy

Any error in the content can repel your website visitors and can lower your brand credibility. Hence, proofread all text, replace placeholder images, and ensure consistency with your brand. 

Just as mistakes in a printed newspaper can lead to embarrassment and can undermine trust in the same way any error in your content can have similar consequences. So, make sure to review and refine every detail before publishing. 

  1. Design and Functionality

In design and functionality you will have to check whether the styling preference, aesthetic appeal and your user experience (UX) all are in alignment. 

  • Styling Preference

Check that your website’s design is in sync with styling preferences set during the planning phase. This includes checking fonts, colours, button styles, and spacing. 

  • Aesthetic Appeal

Review the overall design of your website to make certain that it looks polished and professional. 

Check for any misalignment, pixelated images, or issues with design elements before going public. 

  • User Experience (UX)

Navigate through your website as a user world. Test that it is easy for your users to find information and the overall experience is at par with the trends and seamless. Suppose your website is an e-commerce website, in that case, you will have to ensure that the product pages are easy to navigate with clear calls to action like “Add to Cart” or “Checkout”. 

You will also have to verify that all design elements, like shopping cart icons, are easily visible and that the website looks good on both desktop and mobile devices. 

  1. SEO and Security

It is important to audit technical SEO elements, to set up analytics and establish a secure backup strategy. Here are the reasons why you must check for SEO and security: 

  • Technical SEO 

Make sure that every page is optimised for search engines. This includes checking meta titles, descriptions, headers, and ensuring that alt text is used for images. Confirm that your website’s URL structure is clean and that there are no broken links. 

  • Analytics Setup

Check tools like Google Analytics are properly set up to track your website’s performance. This will help you monitor traffic, user behaviour, conversion rates or lead generation.  

  • Security Measures

Having a backup strategy can save you from many uncertain situations. Install an SSL certificate to secure data transfer between the user’s browser and your website. Make sure all the contact forms are protected from spam and all the data received from the user is stored securely. 

  1. Testing 

There are mainly two things to consider while testing your website:

  • User Experience Tests
  • Conversion Path Tests
  • User Experience Tests

Conduct tests to see how your real users would interact with your site once it is officially live. This can include usability testing where users complete tasks like finding specific information or making a purchase. 

  • Conversion Path Tests

Tests the entire user journey, from landing page to checking whether your user will be easily able to sign up for a newsletter or make a purchase. Make sure that there are no snags or difficulties that could prevent users from converting. 

Here is easy-to-understand checklist

  1. Ensure Text Accuracy: Double-check that all written content is free from errors and accurately reflects the intended message. 
  2. Replace Placeholder Images: Swap out any temporary images with finalised, high-quality visuals and designs. 

[Want to know what makes some websites so popular? Read about Building Interactive Website: Top 10 Inspiring Examples]

  1. Align Copy with Branding: Confirm that the text is consistent with the updated brand voice guidelines. 
  2. Implement Styling Preferences: Verify that all specified design styles and preferences have been correctly applied. 
  3. Aesthetic Review: Ensure the overall design is visually appealing and cohesive. 
  4. Confirm Content Rights: Check that you have the necessary licences or citations for images, fonts, and other content. 
  5. Test User Experience (UI/UX): Conduct a thorough review to ensure the site provides a smooth and intuitive user interface (UI) and user experience (UX).
  6. Verify Conversion Paths: Ensure all conversion paths are set up correctly and functioning as intended. 
  7. Develop a Backup Strategy: Plan and implement a reliable site backup strategy. 
  8. Secure Credentials: Store all passwords and login details securely. 
  9. Audit Technical SEO: Review and correct any technical SEO issues to optimise search engine visibility. 
  10. Recheck User Experience: Perform another UX test to catch any overlooked issues. 
  11. Test Conversion Functionality: Perform another UX test to catch any overlooked issues. 
  12. Verify Third-Party Integrations: Ensure that all third-party tools and integrations are functioning properly. 
  13. Create a Final Backup: Make a complete backup of the final version of your website.
  14. Monitor Backup Processes: Regularly check that backups are being created without any issues. 
  15. Ensure Site Security: Verify that all security measures are in place to protect your website. 
  16. Legal Compliance: Confirm that your site meets all relevant legal requirements and standards. 
  17. Crawl the Site Post-Launch: Perform a site crawl after launch to identify and fix any errors that may have occurred. 
  18. Recheck Technical SEO: Conduct a final review of technical SEO elements to catch any remaining issues. 
  19. Optimise Metadata: Fine-tune your metadata to improve search engine rankings. 
  20. Set Up Analytics: Make sure that analytics tools are properly configured to track site performance. 
  21. Build Launch Anticipation: Create excitement with teasers and previews leading up to the site launch. 
  22. Plan a Social Media Strategy: Develop a plan to talk about your business and to announce the site launch across social media platforms and find ways to boost user engagement. 
  23. Email Your Audience: Send an announcement email to your existing contacts to inform them about the launch of your website and to create brand awareness as well. 
  24. Sustain Launch Promotion: Continue promoting the new site for at least a month post-launch to maintain momentum with your targeted customers. 

Pro Tips: 

  • Having a thorough understanding of the cost of website building is as important as knowing about the development processes. This also will help you in creating and maintaining your budget and finances while creating your dream website.
  • Website development and designing is a tricky task and you may face complications (especially with the complex site building) if you are not expert in coding and dev technicalities. 

Therefore, to eliminate the tech errors and get a smooth finish on your site, get in touch with a professional website development company in Australia, which possesses years of expertise and experience. 

In Closing

A successful website launch is the result of thorough planning, testing, and attention to detail. By following these steps, you’ll be well on your way to creating a website that not only looks great but also performs well and serves your business just as per your plan and business goals. Partnering with Enterprise Monkey means aligning your business with a digital partner dedicated to driving your success. 

With our expertise in creating customised websites, you can empower your business to go above and beyond in a competitive marketplace. Let us be the catalyst for your digital goals.