Ready to Launch Your Website? 7 Simple Tips to Prevent SEO and UX Mistakes

As the website owner, you want to be sure your investment in developing a new website is going to improve your brand awareness and return on your investment. You don't have to be a tech guru yourself to pay attention and ask your website developer questions. Here are seven important steps you can take with your developer to ensure success.

1. Buy an SSL certificate (or use a free one from your web host)

SSL (Secure Socket Layer) security is a necessity for modern websites. SSL keeps data between your website server and a visitor’s browser private.

Not only will Google penalize your site and notify your potential visitors that your website is “not secure”, it also causes Google to rank your site lower in their search results. Having strong security is especially important if you are conducting transactions (i.e. selling items, collecting membership dues, etc.).

Most good website hosts today have shared or simple SSL available as part of your hosting service. This level of security will most likely meet your security needs. If you sell a lot of products, you may want to consider exploring more robust security certificates.

SSL doesn’t have to be expensive, but it is essential.

2. Test your new website on multiple browsers and platforms

Before you launch your new website, test the entire site with multiple website browsers on multiple devices and platforms. Setting up a simple checklist with a list of different platforms and devices makes it easy to track while you’re testing, see the example below:

Testing devices:

• Chrome, Apple OS
• Chrome, Windows
• Chrome, Android phone or tablet
• Chrome, iPhone or iPad
• Firefox, Apple OS
• Firefox, Windows
• Microsoft Edge, Windows
• Safari, Apple OS
• Safari, iPad/iPhone

Does your new website work on every platform? Check that you can click navigation and other links on mobile devices without accidentally clicking something else. Check that images scale appropriately, load times are acceptable, and that page order is maintained. For example, does a sidebar drop to the bottom of the page on mobile? Does that matter?

Test more than the technical presentation of your pages

Don’t forget why you’re having a new website built for you. Besides conducting technical testing, test the top three to five actions you want visitors to accomplish for usability. Can visitors accomplish the tasks easily and without getting lost or confused? Send your staging website links to a few friends and ask them to complete a specific task. Get their feedback -- and use it.

3. Proofread EVERYTHING

We can’t say it enough, proofread everything. Be sure to check and test phone numbers, verify contact information, and don’t forget any pages not in navigation (like landing pages or thank you pages). And don’t forget about the content beyond what’s on the front-end of your website; alt tags, meta descriptions, and other backend information you’ve added need to be proofed too. Ensure that meta descriptions are appropriate for each page, and alt tags should be meaningful and descriptive.

These sections not only make your website more accessible, but also help with your SEO optimization and can benefit your ranking.

4. Test, test, test

After browser testing and proofreading you may feel ready to launch. Don’t forget to check form functions. Use an incognito window and complete the forms on your website. Do you get the correct acknowledgement page after you submit a form? Does the form send information to the right person? If you have marketing automation, does the automation trigger and complete the workflow?

If your new website includes marketing automation workflows, you may want to set timing in your workflow to minutes so you can test the entire sequence.

Don’t forget to test any integrations, such as CRM and payment gateways. Does the information get transferred as it should?

5. Map your old website URLs to your new website (301 redirects)

Creating a new website means that some of your pages from your old website will change their URL address. In our experience, this is a commonly overlooked step with significant implications for your search rankings.

Mapping your old website pages to your new website will help you maintain the hard earned page rank in search engines for your old URLs and keep external links to your old website pages from getting a “404 page not found” error, by telling search engines to remove the old page address and index the new page.

Use a site map of your old site to designate the address on your new website. Be sure your web developer enters the new page addresses as a permanent 301 redirect. (There are many ways to do this depending on your website software.)

6. Create a sitemap for search engines

Be sure you have an XML site map and robots text file to help search engines index your new website. Your web developer may also submit your sitemap to search engines to speed up the indexing process.

If you change or add pages to your website, don’t forget to update your sitemap accordingly. While this can seem like a tedious process, it’s worth the effort for proper indexing and better search engine optimization. There are plugins that can do this for you automatically to help.

7. Optimize pages, even after you launch

Websites don’t need to be picture perfect when you first officially launch, and they likely never will be. Optimize your website pages for speed and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is something that should be ongoing and always updated.

• Each page should have a unique title and meta description.
  A meta description is a short description of the type of information a user can expect to find on your web page.
• Optimize image sizes and make sure they have alt tags and text.
  We recommend trying to keep images below 64kb to increase page load speeds.
  • An image editor to adjust both image dimensions in pixels and image quality can help to reduce the file sizes.
  • If your image is intended to be shared on social media, try to keep one dimension at 1,200 pixels so the image will display properly on the social media platforms.

You can use tools such as Google Page Speed Insights to test your page speed to see how your optimizations are affecting your site.

Ready to launch!

Now that you’ve prepared your new website for the world, it’s time to launch. Remember, it may take a couple of days before everyone sees your new website, depending on your DNS and time to propagate throughout the internet. Be sure you test your work and continue optimization after the launch, including some of the page redirects from your old site.

Editor's note: this blog post was  originally published on 8/22/19 as Seven important steps to launch your new website [checklist], updated on 5/9/24.