Your website is designed, the CMS works, content has been added and the client is happy. It’s time to take the website live. Or is it? When launching a website, you can often forget a number of things in your eagerness to make it live, so it’s useful to have a checklist to look through as you make your final touches and before you announce your website to the world.
Ready to launch that new or redesigned site? Are you SURE? Use this checklist to not miss a thing the next time you’re launching a website.
Launching your new website can be a stressful time, we know. You want to check and double check all of your bases before your pet project is live for everyone to see. We came up with a website checklist of everything you should complete, double check and discuss with your developer before your site launches.
We created the following website checklist for Wired Impact platform clients, but it can be applied to any website launch.
Your Website Checklist
You should be able to accomplish all of the items on this website checklist without outside help, but it never hurts to have a second set of eyes on a page you’re not quite sure about.
- Create a communications plan (internally and externally) for before and after launch.
- Run through the homepage (yes, again) to make sure everything is as you’d like it.
- Get a second opinion.
- Double check the navigation and sidebars to make sure pages are named and ordered as you’d hoped.
- Read through all of your content, making sure that it’s up to date and factual.
- Double check dates and details of volunteer opportunities and events.
- Click every link and ensure that it goes where you intended.
- Check for spelling, typos and grammatical errors.
- Check any sidebar calls-to-action, like Donate or Subscribe to Emails.
- Make sure every page has a meta description.
- Test out your forms.
- Make sure your website has a favicon and that it’s loading properly.
- Make sure you’re happy with all the images you chose and every page that needs an image has one.
- Double check that you have permission to use all of your chosen images.
- Site Speed Testing
Hopefully you can see that everyone on a marketing and web team can be assigned tasks to test leading up to a site launch. This team approach does the best job for the diverse challenge of testing a website. If you can rally your team around these tests, no one person needs to bear the full weight of a site launch.
Summary
Before launching your website, review this checklist, and you should be in pretty good shape. Every site is different, so we may have missed an item or two specific to your site. If you think of necessary items that this list is missing, please drop a line and it could be added to the next iteration.
Make yourself a to-do list and keep it handy to check over before making any website live. Are there any other points you would add?
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