Don’t Launch Your Next Website Without Checking This List

This is a list of items to check before and after launching your site. It’s not necessarily an exhaustive list for every type of website, but it is a good starting point for most sites.

Pre-Launch Checklist

1. Check with Different Devices and Browsers

Checking with smartphones and tablets is a “must” in today’s mobile world, but it’s difficult given the number of different devices out there. At a bare minimum, I check on the iPhone, an Android phone, and an iPad. Yes, it would be great to test on more devices, but most of us don’t have every kind of Android phone. Sometimes I ask friends and family to help.

If you need more coverage, you can use Browserstack or another service. Browserstack has a subscription fee, but they do offer a limited number of free screenshots, which is more than enough for one site.

Reader Samuel recommended LambdaTest for browser testing. It has a free plan with 60 minutes per month as well as affordable paid plans that offer unlimited testing.

Here is a tip that you didn’t hear about here.  Go to a store that sells computers or mobile devices and test your site there with all of their devices. Of course, your site has to be live and on the Internet at that point.

Before launch, I also check the site on the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge.

2. Remove Content Not Intended to Be Found

Remove any posts or pages that you don’t want on the final site. Some WordPress themes come with tons of demo pages. I’ve seen these show up on Google search results for sites! Be sure to remove those, along with any “Hello, World” posts.

Also, check for any placeholder text or photos.  Tip: Search for “Lorem ipsum” or other placeholder text you might have used.

If you are launching a WordPress site, make sure that any custom post types that are not intended to be visible as single posts are redirected.

3. Check for Broken Links

Having broken links on your site can not only be really embarrassing but also fatally impact the functionality of your site, as well as adversely affect your SEO. I use this free online broken link checker. It’s saved my butt on several occasions.

4. Validate Your Code

To make sure your code is error-free, there are many free code validators out there.  Here are a few that I found:

• JavaScript Lint – Need to copy and paste your code.
• W3C Markup Validation Service – Just enter your URL!
• W3C CSS Validation Service – Just enter your URL!
• W3C RSS Feed Validation Service

5.  Check for Copyrighted Content

You should make sure you are not violating someone else’s copyrights. The most problematic areas are usually photographs. I have a colleague who used a random thumbnail photo from the Internet. It turns out that it was owned by Getty Images. He got a cease-and-desist letter and eventually paid $2000 to make the problem go away. That is a nightmare scenario.

Make sure you have the rights to all of your photos, text, audio, and anything else on your site. Check to see if the content requires attribution according to the contract.  Other pitfalls include copyrights with time limits and copyrights limited to certain industries.

You should also protect your content with a copyright notice at the footer of each page. You do want to protect your content, right?

6.  Check Legal Compliance

I am not a lawyer, but here are some things to think about and possibly get legal advice on:

• GDPR compliance
• If you collect user information (such as asking for an email address on a contact form, or by using Google Analytics), do you have a privacy policy on your site?
• Does your mailing list comply with the CAN-SPAM act?
• If your site allows user comments, do you have a terms-of-use policy on your site?
• Does your site comply with accessibility laws (Americans with Disability Act in the U.S.)?

I am not a lawyer, so I can’t tell you how to comply with these things.  I can only point out that these are some of the legal issues that you might need to know about. Of course, there can be and probably are, more.

7. Check Accessibility Compliance

Web accessibility compliance is a big concern today, both to reach the largest audience and to avoid litigation. Make sure you’ve considered WCAG compliance for your site, ideally from the start, not right before launch! Here’s a good accessibility checklist to use.

8. Check On-Site SEO

Make sure all of your images have alt tags and all of your pages have featured images and appropriate meta descriptions.

9. Know Your Redirect Strategy

If the new site is replacing an existing site, you should redirect the old URLs to new ones.

10. Check Your Error Log

Make sure you’re launching a site that is free of errors.  Check for an error_log file in the root of your site. Your hosting control panel should also have a place where you can view error files for things like PHP errors.

11. Check Your Debug Settings

During development, you may have enabled various debugging modes.  For example, on a WordPress site, you might have set WP_DEBUG to true in the wp-config.php file. Or, PHP debugging might be on.  Set these and any other debug modes back to false before launch, in order to prevent unsightly error messages and debugging overhead.

12. Check Load Time

This happened to me a while ago. I had just launched a brand new site for my client.  I was so proud of it that when I visited my parents later that night, I brought up the site on their computer.  To my horror, I noticed it took forever for the main slideshow to load.  It turns out that they have a slow DSL connection, while I have the fastest cable modem service available.  My fast Internet connection was masking the fact that I had not compressed the slideshow images enough.  It was fine on my computer but was terrible on a slow or even medium-speed connection.  On mobile, it would be terrible.

The moral is, test your site using a slow Internet connection.  Turn off Wi-Fi on your phone and see how it loads using 3G.

If your site is slow, you can use Pingdom’s free website speed test to see what is causing the holdup.  Another free service is GTmetrix.  Just enter your URL to get a “waterfall chart” showing exactly what is causing your site to load slowly.  There could be a big uncompressed photo in there that you didn’t know about (that has happened to me).

Post-Launch Checklist

I am assuming here that the site launch involves changing the domain name from a staging domain to the real domain. If your domain is already the real domain, of course, you can and should do these items before “launch”.

1. Make Sure Your Site Is Visible to Search Engines

On a WordPress site, make sure you have checked “Allow search engines to index this site” or else you won’t get any SEO!

2.  See How Your Site Appears on Social Media

With the importance of social media, you should check to see how your site appears on Facebook, Twitter, and any other social media sites you care about unless your site is purely B-to-B.

An easy way to check on Facebook is to enter your URL into the Facebook Debugger.  It will tell you what thumbnail image will be used when someone posts a link to your site on Facebook, as well as all of the metadata that it is reading.  It’s a good sanity test to make sure all of the metadata is there.

Tip: the Facebook Debugger is invaluable if you want to change your site’s thumbnail image.  If you just re-post the site on Facebook after making the change, it will just use the cached (old) image and you’ll be left wondering why it didn’t update.  You need to run your site through the debugger to clear Facebook’s cache.

Here’s the same thing for Twitter.

You can manually test on any other social media sites that you care about.

3.  Set Up Monitoring

If you are using a new server, or are just concerned about your site’s stability, you should use a service to monitor your site. I use Uptime Robot, which lets you monitor 50 sites every five minutes for free!

If you want more than just uptime monitoring, check out Anturis.  It will actually monitor your server status (CPU, memory, processes, etc.), which can be invaluable if you are administering the server yourself.

4. Make Sure Google Analytics Is Working

For analytics, I use Google Analytics on virtually every site I work on. It’s invaluable to measure web traffic, see what pages are popular on your site and where your visitors are coming from, and many other things.

Before launch, make sure the correct Google Analytics code is on the site. After launch, make sure you see site activity in your Google Analytics account.

5. Check Your File Permissions

Make sure your site is secure by checking your file permissions.  In general, folders should be 755 and files should be 644 (check with your hosting company to be sure).  You can see/change these in Filezilla or through your hosting company control panel.  A red flag is any file or folder with 777 permissions.  These should be changed immediately.

6. Redirect Non-WWW or WWW

Pick which version of your domain name you want to use (non-WWW or WWW) and redirect the other one to that.

7. Enable SSL and Test

Enable SSL and make sure the site is forced to “https”. If your site launch included changing the domain name, remember that you’ll have to wait for the domain to propagate before getting the SSL cert, resulting in some unavoidable downtime.

On WP Engine, note that you need to get an SSL cert for both the non-WWW and WWW versions of the domain name.

Test every version of http/https and non-www/www of your domain name; that is:

1. http://yourdomain.com
2. http://www.yourdomain.com
3. https://yourdomain.com
4. https://www.yourdomain.com

8. Make an Archive Copy

When everything looks kosher, make a backup of the site so that you can restore it to its original pristine state if necessary.

9. Make Sure Backups Are Working

Moving forward, you’ll want to make sure your site is backed up regularly. If you’re on cPanel on GoDaddy, make sure your site is in the Installatron and has backups set up. If you have GoDaddy’s paid backup service, make sure it’s backing up the right database. If you’re using a different backup scheme, make sure it’s working.

What other tips and tricks do you use to check your website? – Brian