Hello, friends today we are going to tell you about the things you should know Before Launching a Website. Web design and development is quite a long process and we have to make sure that nothing is missed, professionals using checklists. We hope this checklist will help you with the best strategies related to web design, web development, and SEO.

1. Website Backup

You should always have a backup of the whole website because it is the only solution when anything goes wrong.  If your website is in WordPress, there are many free WordPress backup plugins that you can set up within minutes.

2. Review all Single Website Pages

Before launching a website go through these points with depth checking for readability, functionality, and visual appearance. Logo, images, Navigation bar, Footer, Design layout, Content, Calls-to-action buttons, Links, Forms, Maps, Contact info, Sidebars, Pop-ups, Social media icons, Widgets, Logins/portals

3. Check Email and Forms

Once you have set up an email for your website with the server, the next thing you need to do is to make sure that all forms on your site are working well. Test your contact forms, email subscription forms, and Comment forms.

4. Check Premium Media

If you have purchased premium Media such as photos or videos and used them on the website then you should make sure that you have mentioned copyright in the footer. Furthermore, make a privacy policy for your website.

5. Social media plug-ins

Make sure that your website visitors can find your social media icons to connect with your website on social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, etc. You should check that social sharing plugins on your website and blogs are working properly.

6. Check text/HTML ratio

The text-to-HTML ratio refers to the amount of text on a web page versus the HTML code on the same web page.  An Ideal HTML ratio is anywhere from 25 to 70 percent.  It is not a direct ranking factor for search engines but there are many factors that are related to text to HTML ratio and directly affect search engine ranking.

7. Do check for duplicate content

Do a search to see if your content exists elsewhere on the Web or not! And make sure you have removed the dummy content.  You may want to check the outcome and use it regularly. Check with Copyscape or Plagiarism software.

8. Broken links

Before Launching a Website check all website links with screaming frog. It can help you to figure out all the 404 links.

9. Custom 404 Page

Before Launching a Website make a custom 404 page to make a difference for your brand.  Check out the best 404 pages!

10. Upgrade your WordPress and Plug-ins

Before launching a website, check that you’re using the latest updated WordPress installation as well as plugins and themes.

11. Mobile Rendering

Just check out whether your website is mobile-responsive or not. 57 % of mobile users will leave your website if it takes more than 3 sec to load and 30 percent will cancel a purchase transaction if the shopping cart isn’t well optimized for mobile devices. That’s why you should make your site responsive and mobile-friendly delivers a great user experience with Getting SEO benefits. Use Google’s Mobile-friendly test to check mobile responsiveness.

12. Google Analytics

Do you have set up Google Analytics for tracking and reporting the website traffic? After verifying Google Analytics is collecting website traffic data.

13. Exclude your IP address

Set up filters in Google Analytics to exclude traffic from the IP address. You can get your IP address by typing “what is my IP” into Google.

14. The WebMaster Tools

Do you have set up a search console and Bing Webmaster Tools? It checks website indexing status and optimizes the visibility of their websites.  Note: Configure your website with https:// if your website has an SSL certificate.

15. SSL Certificate

If your website already has an SSL certificate, then transfer your website to the new server. If not, then purchase a new SSL. This can take up to two weeks to set all pages to HTTPS. SSL certificate will ensure your website is encrypted so hackers can’t hack any of your data. Not only will this build trust in your website visitors, but it’ll also boost your SEO ranking since SSL is now part of Google’s search ranking algorithm.

16. Robots.txt

Check robots.txt file, it gives instructions to web robots that how to crawl and index pages from the website. Also make sure that all sites’ pages are not set to noindex, nofollow.  Furthermore, check all the login pages that should be set up to the index, nofollow.

19. Sitemap

Check your Sitemap files on the server side as well as on the website.  It helps search engines for better indexing pages and determining website structure.

20. Site links

In the search console, Go for Search Appearance > Sitelinks to demote the links that you won’t display in search results pages.

21. W3C Validation

Make validate your content with W3C Validation. World Wide Web Consortium allows users to check HTML code for web-formatted markup. This validation is required for enduring the quality of WebPages.  As result, W3c helps to improve search ranking and give a better user experience.

Things you should know Before Launching a Website

The article was published on January 16, 2017 @ 4:02 PM

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