You’ve Finished Designing Your New Website, But Are You Ready To Launch?
Whether you created a new website or are making big changes to an old site, hopefully, you made changes that will benefit your business. Because your website gives the most authentic impression of your brand to your audience, you’ll want to make sure that everything is in working order before your launch.
Follow These Four Tips To Make Sure Your Website Is Ready For Launch:
1. Stay Organized
You put a lot of effort into creating your new website, so it’s important to keep track of all the changes made. Assign tasks to different members of your team to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. You want everything up and ready when you launch, so you want to stay organized and know exactly what is left to be done.
Keep this list handy during launch prep, because it will allow you to audit every change made. Have other team members review the site – a fresh perspective can often find errors you may have overlooked. Have team members write down every little change that needs to be made and make a note when it has been fixed.
You can also make a list of tests you want to perform before launching, the outcome of each test, and the changes that need to be made before launching. Running tests on your website will give you a better sense of the functionality of the site, and can provide helpful insight into what changes need to be made.
2. Review Everything
By everything, we mean EVERYTHING. The last thing you want is to launch your new website that you’ve worked hard on, only to have embarrassing grammar, spelling, or informational errors.
Have multiple people comb through every part of your website to search for mistakes or typos that might have been missed.
Although content is important, the usability of your website’s layout can also have a huge impact on visitor engagement and usability.
Test your website by having multiple people navigate throughout the site in a way your potential visitors will. You might be familiar with the layout, but if clunky navigation confuses new visitors, they will quickly be deterred from buying.
Have reviewers explore your menus, search function, and any other features to make sure they are easily accessible and working properly.
3. Test Everything
Once you are satisfied with the content of your site, you are going to want to test the site. There are many different aspects that can be tested, and each is important for increasing traffic and improving conversion rates.
First test your site speed. How long does your site take to load? Faster loading time means a better user experience, a greater chance of conversion, and better search engine ranking. To test your site speed, try Google PageSpeed Insights.
Next, test all CTA’s on your site. Have someone test every form, making sure they collect user input accurately, direct users to the right pages, and react to user action correctly.
Similarly, you want to check that every link works. You want to make sure that not only the links within your website work but also that any link to an outside source is working and then remove any dead links.
SEO determines how easily new users will find your site, so it is imperative that you optimize your site in order to build a bigger audience. The most important aspects of SEO to your site are URLs, titles, meta descriptions, image titles and alt-text, and content. Visit this SEO Management Guide for more on how to review your SEO.
Although you may favor a particular browser, you want to make sure your site functions properly on multiple browsers. Your site might load quickly and display properly on one browser, but reviewing on multiple browsers will ensure that user experience is consistent.
Additionally, you will need to make sure your website is mobile-responsive. Having a mobile site will increase your audience since 50% of global mobile web users use mobile as their primary or exclusive way to access the Internet, and 52.2 % of all website traffic worldwide was generated through mobile phones in 2018.
Finally, if you expect an influx of visitors, make sure your site can handle the stress of incoming traffic. Perhaps your site gets more users at a certain time of year or during a specific campaign; you want to make sure that the site can handle hosting many visitors so you don’t lose any possible leads to website server failure.
4. Collect Analytics After Launch
Lastly, once you launch your site, you want to be able to track how the new changes are affecting your business. Collecting a variety of analytics will turn your qualitative changes into quantifiable data.
Google Analytics is a great free resource for collecting data on website visitors. This data is sorted into four different categories:
Audience reports – who is viewing your site and what content are they most interested in?
Acquisition reports – what search terms were used to discover your content and what sources are these visitors coming from?
Behavior reports – how do visitors navigate your site, what is their user experience, and how do we engage visitors?
Conversion reports – is your website/content bringing you closer to achieving your goals?
Creating a website for your business is incredibly important for driving organic traffic and boosting growth and revenue, but if your website is not optimized then your efforts could be going to waste.
Thoroughly preparing for your launch will help to prevent launching a deficient website, so be sure to review, test, and analyze.
Thanks for reading,
Christine
