15 Things to Check Before Launching Your Website

You have designed an awesome website and you’re excited! The CMS has been working perfectly fine and you have added fresh pieces of content. You are now ready to launch the website.

But wait! Is that all? Usually, people tend to forget about a few of the key aspects of a website design, in their excitement to launch their websites. It’s always recommended to maintain a checklist of the things that needs to be examined before you launch your website.

Here are the most important checks for testing your website to enhance the overall user experience. These checks will also help you avoid any extra or unnecessary costs that arise by ignoring or forgetting to include certain specific details in your website, due to carelessness.

1. Favicon

Favicons give your website a great professional appearance. Also known as the tab icon, bookmark icon or shortcut icon, it is an excellent way for people to identify your website, when a large number of tabs are open in the browser window simultaneously.

Therefore, a favicon can be viewed as something that brands the window or tab, in which the user has kept your website open in their browser. To help people easily identify pages from your website, it will be saved with bookmarks.

2. Defensive designs

The 404 error page is the most commonly overlooked aspects of defensive designs. Sometimes, when an unexpected problem occurs and a requested page is found to be missing, then the 404 error page will be fetched and displayed to the user. You need to design a 404 page that will essentially direct your users to the home page or you can provide some other relevant links to your website.

You can also use another defensive design technique for checking validation across your forms. Input some irrelevant information in the fields of your form, such as lots of characters or letters in number fields etc. When an error arises, ensure that the user is provided with the necessary information to help them fix it with ease.

3. Content and proofreading

Ensure you have removed all “Lorem ipsum” dummy content and replaced it with original and fresh pieces of content.

Although you might have a profound knowledge of English and grammatical syntax, it’s still possible that you might have mistakes in some places, if you have not re-read what you have written.

Have someone proofread it for you and perform plagiarism checks to ensure that you are using fresh and unique content, which is what your users are searching for.

4. Search engine optimisation (SEO)

Content is obviously what drives customers to your website, but the force that drives customers to your website is SEO. Your website needs to be found by the search engines, when people search for related queries and it should rank among the topmost of the search engine results.

SEO is the force that drives your website to rank higher over the search engines. Only an SEO expert knows what it takes to attain visibility and keywords are the answer.

5. Title pages

Title pages comprise of the most important aspects of SEO. And while writing page titles, you need to take care to ensure that these are precise, clear and contain the exact description of the content contained in the page.

Ensure that your title does not exceed 70 characters, so that it doesn’t have its tail cut off in the search results. When you include the relevant keywords in the title, you are ensuring that it gets crawled and your website will reach the target audiences.

6. Meta descriptions and alt tags

Search engine rankings are not dependent on meta descriptions anymore, but still they are an important aspect that needs to be taken into consideration to reach your target audience. This content – written in short paragraphs – offers webmasters with an advantage to promote their content to searchers and helps people know whether they are going to click on a page that contains the relevant information.

You also need to use alt tags with all the images. However, make sure that you don’t stuff in too many keywords. In the case when an image doesn’t load properly, alt tags contain a description of the image that helps the users know what the image is all about.

7. Cross browser compatibility and responsiveness

Although your website looks pixel perfect across Chrome, you need to ensure that it’s compatible across various other browsers, as ell.

You also need to ensure that your website is responsive across a variety of devices, including Android phones, iPhones, tablets etc. This ensures that all the users can derive the same kind of user experience across all the devices and browsers.

As per Google’s latest strategies, mobile responsiveness is a compulsory factor that all websites need to implement to rank higher over the search engines.

8. Functionality checks

This is one of the most important aspects of a website’s design. If you have a contact form on your webpage, make sure that all the entities are functioning perfectly – starting with whether it gets redirected to the appropriate “thank you” page and whether it gets sent to the intended person, the functionality of the social share icons, the company logo and also the links that will help people navigate back to the homepage.

Basically, that anything and everything on the website is in perfect working condition. Test each and every functionality for yourself. Ask others to test it across again. Not just your employees and friends but also get the target audience to get it tested. Sit beside them while they test it and see those minute things that you’ve missed out. By no means, don’t make vague assumptions.

9. RSS links

Whenever your website has blog or news subscription entities, then you need to implement an RSS feed that the users can subscribe to. Simplify it, such that people can find the RSS feed with ease. The common practice is to include a small RSS icon in the address bar.

10. Validations

The aim of any website developer is to obtain 100% website validation. This means that, in case your website acts odd and does not validate, you can find the reasons and fix the errors that have been preventing the website from offering a proper validation. Commonly found errors are missing alt tags, the absence of closing tags, etc.

11. Analytics

How do you measure the number of visitors reaching out to your website? A lot of people fail to include analytics on their websites, thus failing to analyse the effectiveness of their website.

You need to install the analytics tools that plays an important role in helping you get the statistics of how effectively your website is performing and that also measure the conversion rates of your website.

12. Sitemap

This is another important aspect that helps some of the major search engines to index websites with ease. You just need to include a sitemap file in the root directory that directs crawlers to all the pages on your website.

13. Optimisation

Configuring your website to ensure a perfect performance across the web is usually a post-launch service but you can essentially consider including a few more steps during the before launch to ensure a smooth performance.

Try including CSS scripts and also reduce the intensity of the HTTP requests. Compress the JavaScript and CSS files and optimise images for the web.

These steps help to reduce the page loading time, increase the speed and prevent unnecessary wastage of the server resources.

14. Javascript

Javascript introduces an obvious amount of client-side functionality to any website and it’s also easy to implement as it is lightweight. The problem though is with the browsers across which the websites are being accessed, since not all browsers operate with the same lines of functionality. Some of them have their JavaScripts turned off for either no reason or just because they don’t know how to switch it on once it has been turned off.

You need to ensure JavaScript independence across your website, so that it doesn’t appear incomplete or broken when the visitors try to access it. The best way to fix this is to turn off your browser’s JavaScript and try browsing across your website. If it appears broken, you need to get it fixed.

15. CRM Integration

If your website’s major focus is capturing leads, then it will be great if you can integrate a CRM (ustomer relationship management) with your website. This helps to simplify things and also make the process automatic.

So, whenever a subscriber gets added to your mailing list, the automation system in your CRM will turn on and will automatically mail them. Websites that are not using this kind of integration system are losing out on a number of hot leads.

SOURCE: Acodez