Overlooking small details could have serious consequences for your website. It might affect your site’s performance, result in data loss, compromise functionality, impact SEO ranking, or even increase your paid advertising expenses. Even if you’ve had your website built professionally, it’s still a good idea to double-check if things are done correctly.
Below is a checklist to go through before launching your WordPress site:
WordPress Basics:
- Important – Setup an automatic backup plugin to a remote location (we recommend Updraft) and Double check backups are saving.
- Set the time zone – Settings > General
- Set Language to English – Settings > General
- Check / Set the admin email address – Settings > General
- Systematically browse through the site looking for broken links, missing links, or dummy content, e.g., ‘Lorem Ipsum’ text.
- Check all Social Links are correct and connecting
- Check that Email and contact links are working and going to the correct address
- Check the site loading speed, (Chrome developer tools > network, should be less than 2MB). Check all images, use JPGs where possible, PNGs only for transparency. Possible to use GIFs if PNGs are too big (lower quality).
- Make sure contact form emails are backing up to the database.
Spam:
- Activate an Anti-spam plugin such as Akismet.
- Is your Hello World post and sample page deleted? These are often targeted by spammers posting comments.
Browser Testing:
Depending on your audience this will vary but here are the essential browsers and sizes to test.
- Chrome
- Internet Explorer
- Edge
- Firefox
- Safari
- iPad size
- Laptop browser size. Very wide and narrow.
- Mobile device (both apple & Android)
Blog:
- Check the post navigation
- Test the search results page
- Test the comments area
Extras:
- Add a favicon
- Test any subscribe Forms
- Test the share button
- Enable SSL – Inspect for SSL errors
Basic SEO:
- Add an SEO Plugin
- Create at least a good homepage title. Continue with other pages as soon as you can.
- If it’s a website rebuild, you may need some 301 Redirects.
Things to do just before you go live:
- Create analytics and webmaster tools and add tracking
- Create XML Sitemaps and submit to Google when doing SEO
- Fetch as Google in webmaster tools. Crawl > Fetch as Google
- Settings > Reading > UNTICK Discourage search engines from indexing site. Or never tick this in the first place.
Final checks after going live:
- Check backups are working.
- Check email forms again.
- Verify emails in general, are working normally.
