It can be quite intimidating when you are building a new website or have just given your site a brand new web design. You want your brand to be represented successfully and your site to look impressive. Further to that though, there’s all the time and effort that goes into the stuff at the back-end. All that coding that is barely visible to the general public, but is vital to the effectiveness of your website.
Once your website is up and running, you need to think about launching it. How do you go about that? What if there’s something you didn’t do? Fortunately, there’s a great way to check if you’ve missed out anything or not. With this handy checklist.
Check Your Site’s Media Is Working Properly
Check and double check that all the images and videos on your site are working properly. Make sure you have the proper accreditation in place for the owners of any written content and images you’ve sourced from.
Proofread, Edit and Check the Formatting of Your Site
Even if you’re sure the spelling and grammar is perfect, it’s worth reading through everything again. Edit it if you need to and even considering rewriting things. It may even be worth asking someone else to proof it too, just to ensure it makes sense and reads well.
The formatting of your content is crucial to its readability. So, even if you have the most captivating content on the web, if it’s hard to read or digest because your readers can’t tell what’s the main bulk and what the headings are, it’ll be lost on them.
Check Your Site’s Compatibility
Although your website may work fine on your own browser, not all of your target audience will be using the same one. So, you need to make sure that your website works fine on all the most popular browsers. That means not only Firefox and Chrome, but Safari and other handheld ones too. This is crucial because you want to make sure all your potential customers have the same experience online.
Check Your Contact Forms
You should also run through all your forms and make sure they work properly. Fill them out with test information and ensure the right message is sent out and to the right place.
Check the Icons and Click-throughs
Do all your icons and click-throughs work as they should. This includes things like social media links and those to other websites and profiles.
SEO
Make sure the SEO of your site is of a high standard. Unless that’s your area of expertise, consider hiring a company with SEO services experience to check your site. They will look at the keywords, tags, content and page titles and check whether they are going to help you rank well on Google and other search engines or not.
What About Security?
Do you have effective security in place? Is your site monitored 24/7? Make sure you have backups in place for your site, just in case the worst happens.
Check Your Website Meets Its Legal Requirements
It’s legally required nowadays to announce whether or not you use cookies. Aside from making it clear to your visitors, there are other things you need to make sure you have in place. These include:
- PCI Compliancy
- Privacy and terms of use
- Impaired users’ accessibility
Do you Have Your Favicon?
The favicon is the icon for your website. As important is it is, it’s also easy to forget about. Ensure you have it in place and it looks how it should.
Print this checklist off and keep it handy for any new web launch project. It may just save your website.