If you’re about to launch a new website, there are many different factors to consider in order to achieve a successful launch. Outstanding design is essential to demonstrate the authority of your website. It should be visually appealing but not too distracting or flashy, as this can come off as unprofessional or amateurish. All images on the site should be high-quality to convey your professionalism and trustworthiness.
When launching a website, it’s also essential to consider what kind of content you want on it. This includes the types of services or products you will offer on the site, how much information it will contain about those services or products, what language(s) it will be in, who will be responsible for running/maintaining it, and what kind of customer service will be offered on it (such as live chat). Here are ten simple tips that will help you launch a website successfully.
Prepare to Launch on a Set Date, Fine-Tune, And Publish
Launching a website on a set date is an essential but daunting task. The most crucial element to consider before the launch is the deadline. If you don’t have a deadline, selecting which content to include can be challenging and how to go about it. You should keep a checklist of what has been done up until this point and what still needs to be done before launch day. Most websites will have a blog, where you should post your progress, any changes in plans, and other helpful resources for your audience.
It’s also essential to consider how your website will look on different devices and browsers. You (or your developers) should try out your website on as many devices as possible to identify and correct any design flaws early on. You must ensure your website is responsive so that it looks good and works smoothly on screens of all sizes.
Set Up Social Media Accounts Beforehand
Creating social media accounts for your website before it goes live will help you to be more prepared. One of the best ways to do this is to create a list of all the sites you want to promote, then sign up for them. You can also create a spreadsheet that has each site and the username and password. This will help you keep track of all your information and not forget what you have already set up after launching a website.
Social media can help boost your search engine ranking, so be sure to add relevant content to all of your online profiles. Make sure that the content you add is engaging so that people will want to share it with their friends and followers. Be wise about what you post — remember that if you add something controversial, you might lose followers and harm your brand’s reputation.
Build A One-Month Content Stockpile
It’s essential to have a stockpile of content before launching a website to make it easy to post fresh content regularly. If possible, create a one-month content stockpile so you have more time to create future posts. You should aim to post 2-3 posts per week on your site.
Find out what topics are popular on your site, then brainstorm more blog topics related to them. List all the ideas you come up with in a spreadsheet.
When you’re ready to start working on your next post, choose one of the ideas from your list that fits into the current month. Then write the post and schedule it for publication on your site.
Implement Responsive Site Design
Responsive site design means that the site’s layout changes to fit different screen sizes. It is essential as more and more people browse the web on everything from desktop computers to tablets and smartphones.
The idea behind responsive site design is to provide an optimal viewing experience to all users by using fluid grids and flexible images and media. It enables designers to create one website that works seamlessly on any desktop computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone. Mobile-friendliness is especially important, since 52.2% of worldwide website traffic comes from mobile devices.
Implement SEO For Your Website
One way to improve the ranking of your site is to implement search engine optimization (SEO) after launching a website. SEO is the process of incorporating text, links, and other material on your site in a way that improves your site’s rankings on search engines to increase the number of visitors and, ultimately, conversions. Strong SEO rankings are essential, because 95% of users don’t look beyond the first page of search results. The two main factors that impact SEO are content and backlinks.
Content: Featuring content that addresses what people are searching for will help increase traffic. To do this, you should research topics related to your blog posts and find keywords relating to those topics. Then you want to include the keywords in your post title (ideally in the first few words) and throughout the post. You can also include keywords in your images by including them in file names. You can use word clouds or tag clouds to visualize how often certain words should appear on your page.
Backlinks: Search engines measure sites according to their rank on an index page, listing pages from most popular to least popular. A backlink is a link from another site that leads back to yours. The more backlinks (from authoritative sources) to your page, the higher you rank. The number one result on Google has 3.8 times more backlinks on average than pages in positions two through ten. There are many ways you can get backlinks, such as by posting guest blogs on other sites or running forum discussions about some of your topics of interest and doing social media outreach, such as posting links on Facebook or Twitter. Having a sound backlink strategy will help you succeed after launching a website.
Prepare Analytics
A website can have a profound effect on your business, but not if it is not prepared to handle traffic. Although you may have a beautiful website, without the proper analytic tools in place, you will have no way of monitoring how many visitors are coming to your website or assessing how well the site is meeting your audience’s needs. It can be very frustrating if you’ve spent time and money on a website, only to find that you’re not seeing the returns you expected because certain functions aren’t performing properly. Add the following three tools before launching your website to help identify and troubleshoot any website issues:
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a web analytics service created by Google. It is used to collect data about web traffic, behavior, and interaction. The service gathers data through Google’s advertising network, primarily made up of advertisers who use Google Ads. Google Analytics is the most widely used website statistics service on the Internet. It lets you track:
- Lead conversion rate
- Sources of traffic, bounce rate
- Website revenue
Content Analytics
Content analytics is a way to measure success after launching a website. By using a content analytics tool, you can see how people interact with your website and what content they’re engaging with the most. This data can then be used to optimize your website.
Some features of a content analytics tool are:
- How far down the webpage users read your content
- Identify the best places to add your call-to-action buttons
- Use real-time data to make adjustments
Heat Maps
A heat map is a graphical representation of data that shows the density of the data at different points. The most common use for heat maps is to show where people click on a website to improve the user interface.
Heat maps for websites work by highlighting the areas on a page that users click on most often. The map will highlight the pixels in those areas with red and yellow, while other parts of the site will be blue or green. Heat maps can help you analyze where your visitors spend their time on a site, which areas they find engaging, and even where they might have difficulty understanding something on a page.
Heat maps help you assess performance after launching a website in the following ways:
- You can identify where website users are clicking and spending most of their time so you can better target them
- You can get real-time feedback about which buttons are located in low traffic regions
Perform A Pre-Launch Website Audit
The main goal of a pre-launch website audit is to identify any potential issues that could cause problems for your company. Auditing your website before launching it will ensure you do not have any significant issues after your site goes live. We recommend these steps:
- Conduct a site map of the entire website
- Identify any broken links or redirects after launching a website
- Check for any 404 error pages or errors on the server
- Check for any typos, misspellings, or grammatical errors on the site
- Protect against malware by using an up-to-date virus scanner
- Check for security issues
- Check for any SEO errors or warnings
- Check the site’s code to make sure it is compliant with a company’s standards
- Make sure the site is mobile-friendly
- Test the site for speed and load time
- Fix any coding errors, broken links, or other website errors that were found in the audit
Backup Your Site
The most important thing to do when backing up your site is to save the site as a whole. If you back up individual files and folders, you could risk losing everything if one of those files becomes corrupted after launching a website. One way to backup your site is to create a zip file of the directory on your hard drive where all of your blog posts and content reside.
The next thing you should do is create a second backup that includes a copy of your database. You can do this in your dashboard by going into the tools section and clicking on the export link in the left-side navigation menu. This will take you to a page where you can download an XML file of all of your posts, comments, categories, and tags.
In addition to this, you should also create a backup of your core files so that if anything happens to your site’s files or database, you have a way to restore them. To ensure that everything is working correctly after being restored, you should set up a test site on another domain name (like http://testdomainname.com). Then back up your site again and restore it on that domain name. Once everything has been restored and is working correctly, remove the content from your test site and move your content back over to your primary website domain name.
Triple-Check Your Website for Technical Issues
Do you want an excellent website? One way to do this is to triple-check your website for technical issues after launching a website. Many things can go wrong with a website, and it’s best to be proactive about fixing them before they cause any problems.
Some common technical issues you should check for are broken links, 404 errors, and compatibility errors. Broken links happen when the web address of an image or other page no longer works. This can happen if the image or page is moved or deleted. 404 errors happen when someone tries to visit a page on your site that no longer exists. Compatibility errors happen when a browser cannot open a specific web page because it is not compatible with that browser type.
If you have any of these issues on your website, you may want to fix them as soon as possible so that no one else has trouble viewing your site.
Post-Launch Diagnostics & Announcing the Launch of Your New Website
A post-launch diagnosis for a website is the process of identifying and fixing any problems that occurred after the launch. It includes:
- Data analysis (content, usage, etc.)
- Technical analysis (compatibility with different browsers, quality of code, etc.)
- User feedback (comments, suggestions)
A post-launch diagnosis after launching a website is also an excellent opportunity to make improvements to the website. You can use the data collected to improve your website’s content or usability. You can also use this data to improve your marketing strategy.
Let everyone know when your website has been launched by announcing it on social media. Inform your followers and friends about the new site and ask them for any feedback.
Conclusion
It’s essential to have a clear strategy when launching a website. It’s not enough to create a site that’s aesthetically appealing. You need to think critically about your visitors, how they will find you, and what they are looking for. The steps mentioned here will help you launch a website successfully. For more tips on optimizing your business website, make sure to follow the BESTWEB blog. We post regularly about web design and development to help you improve your website for greater success.