Getting ready to launch your brand new website? It’s important to do a last runthrough to ensure that everything looks good, works properly, and is ready for public consumption.
To help guide you through this process, we’ve put together the ultimate website launch checklist. Walk through each item to make sure everything is ready to go so that launch will be as smooth as possible.
Let’s get started.
Why Is a Website Launch Checklist Important?
No matter how many websites you may have created in the past, having a concrete checklist to follow along with is always a good idea. This way, you can confidently say each page is in working order, and you get that euphoric feeling that comes with checking something off a list.
But why else should you follow along with a website checklist? Here are a few reasons why this is such an important step in any website launch:
- Ensure no mistakes are missed: Regardless of how confident you are in your skills, you could still make mistakes — we’re only human, right? But like we said, following a checklist ensures that nothing slips through the cracks.
- Improve the user experience: As you go through your checklist, you might notice a few areas that don’t work as well as you thought they would when you were creating the site. This checklist gives you the perfect opportunity to improve those areas so the user experience is even better.
- Make sure the site is secure: Including items like getting an SSL certificate and ensuring you have a backup of your website can help with overall security and peace of mind after launch. With Durable, you don’t have to worry about setting up any security measures, it’s all included and done for you.
- Proofread your copy: Before you go live, it’s important to read over your copy to ensure you haven’t made any mistakes. It happens to the best of us, which is why this step is so important.
- Get your analytics properly set up: Website analytics help you understand if your site is performing well, making these a key asset to your business. As a part of your launch checklist, you’ll want to make sure these are working properly so you can track traffic and other important metrics.
Keep in mind that with Durable, users don’t have to worry about this. Our AI sets up your website for you including built-in analytics, security measures, website copy, and more. Take the pressure off with Durable.Durable’s AI website builder.
Website Launch Checklist: 20 Key Items
Ready to start prepping for your website launch? Follow along with this 20-step checklist to make sure everything is ready to go.
#1. Proofread Your Website Copy
Run through all of your website pages and read your copy. This includes headlines, subheadings, buttons, regular copy, and anything else that has been written for your website.
Typos and grammatical errors can easily occur, especially when writing and reviewing a lot of copy at once. It’s always a good idea to take a step back, then come back to proofread before launch. If you used an AI assistant to help with your copy, you’ll also want to read through it to ensure accuracy.
You can also use a tool like Grammarly or ProWritingAid to help.
#2. Test Links and Buttons
Go through and click on every link or button that you’ve included on your website. Sometimes it’s easy to paste the wrong URL or even forget to add a link to a button, and you don’t want to disrupt the customer journey with an incorrect or broken link.
#3. Ensure Site Design Is Cohesive
Does the design you chose for your homepage make sense alongside the design you chose for your secondary pages (i.e., product pages or sales pages)?
Pro tip: Using a Durable website template helps ensure the entire website is cohesive for you.
#4. Make Sure Your Design Is on Brand
If you use a website template, ensure the fonts and colors align with your brand. It’s important your marketing materials, website, and other business materials are cohesive.
With Durable, it’s easy to be sure your website design is fully on brand so that customers can easily recognize it when they navigate to your site. You can select from a number of color palettes and font options and customize your site as many times as you need.
If you don’t have a brand, you can build a brand kit with Durable and apply your new brand colors and fonts directly to your website design.
#5. Review Your Media
Are all of your images, graphics, and/or videos showing up properly? Are they high quality while also not being too large of files?
Optimize your images by compressing the size as much as you can without losing quality. This can help improve site loading speed while still ensuring everything looks great.
#6. Finalize Your Domain Name
In many cases, your domain name is the first step in getting your website up and running. However, some website builders save this for last. So finding your domain name, making sure it matches your business name, and getting it fully connected to your website and website host is an essential step before launch.
With Durable, you don’t have to worry about domain and web hosting logistics. Users get a free custom domain with every Durable subscription.
#7. Optimize for SEO
SEO, or search engine optimization, is how people find your website in search engine results. So you need to be sure your website is fully optimized prior to launch.
A few ways to do this include:
- Setting up your site’s metadata (i.e., meta title, meta descriptions, and image alt text) to fully explain what your business does while strategically incorporating keywords.
- Using Durable’s built-in SEO tools or third-party plugins to help with optimization.
- Link between related pages to help search engines better understand your website hierarchy.
- Follow technical SEO guidelines to ensure your website is set up to rank.
#8. Ensure Mobile Responsiveness
Another good step for both SEO and user experience is to ensure your website can easily be accessed and navigated on mobile devices. In fact, you should cross-check your website on multiple devices and browsers to ensure it appears and works as it should across the board.
#9. Set Up Your SSL Certificate
An SSL certificate is a digital file that verifies your website and adds an extra layer of security for your visitors. This is what turns your website from an insecure “HTTP” to a verified “HTTPS,” helping browsers and users feel more comfortable accessing your site.
All Durable websites include the highest security measures, including SSL certificates.
#10. Connect Your Website Analytics
If your website builder doesn’t come with built-in analytics, you should connect your website to Google Analytics to ensure you have access to in-depth, free metrics that inform you about your website’s performance. Test that you have it set up correctly before launch.
#11. Test Your Site’s User Experience
Walk through your website the way you envision a customer navigating it, page by page. Does the sequence make sense? Is it a cohesive website experience? Is it easy to use? If you find any kinks in the experience, make necessary changes to ensure your audience won’t have the same struggles.
#12. Check Website Speed
If your website is slow, people won’t want to use it. Take advantage of Google’s PageSpeed test to check your website speed and get insights on ways to improve so that your site loads easily and creates a more enjoyable experience — especially for those accessing it on mobile.
#13. Test Your Email Sign-up Form
First things first, add a sign-up form so that you can build your email list. Second, test it out to be sure that people are being added to your list and that your welcome email goes out without a hitch.
You can easily create a form and communicate with your contact list using Durable’s CRM tool.
#14. Test Contact Form(s)
In a similar vein, if you’ve added any contact forms — i.e., requests for information, demo requests, feedback boxes — test each one to ensure they’re in working order so that you don’t miss any customer messages.
#15. Customize 404 Pages
Although you should have found and fixed any broken links in step two when you tested all links and buttons throughout the website, things may still break in the future. It’s a good idea to create a custom 404 page that links back to your most important pages, just in case someone ends up clicking on a broken link.
#16. Save Your Website Copy
Make sure to save all of your website content and copy. Trust us — having a backup of your website content can save you a lot of headaches in the future.
#17. Submit Your Website for Indexing
Once you publish your website, the search engines will eventually find it as they’re crawling the internet and start indexing it within their ranking pages (as long as you have indexing turned on).
However, there’s nothing wrong with getting a head start by submitting your website’s sitemap to Google Search Console in order to let the search engine know it’s ready to be indexed.
#18. Create a Privacy Policy
Creating policy information, like a privacy policy, terms and conditions, and the like, can serve as legal documents meant to protect your business. You can get a lawyer to help draft these up or customize a policy template you find online.
#19. Confirm Integrations Are Working
Have you integrated your website with any third-party tools? A payment processor? A social media feed? Test each one to confirm that it works properly before launch.
#20. Create a Launch Plan
Finally, put together a launch plan to promote your new website. Tease it on social media, share details in your email newsletter, and let customers know when they come into your store or place of business if you have one. Once you’ve got this plan in motion and you’ve checked all the boxes, you’ll be ready to launch!
Use Durable's Website Launch Checklist for Your Next Site Launch
Launching a new website is exciting — but you don’t want to publish your website only to realize that there are issues you need to fix. Instead, use our website launch checklist to cover your bases before hitting that publish button.
Our AI website builder can also be a huge help in making sure that your website is well-designed and functioning properly.
