Critical Steps to Complete Before Launching Your Website

Your website redesign/migration project was a lot of work, but you’re finally ready to go live. The design and development work has been completed, you’ve finished Quality Control (QC) and User Acceptance Testing (UAT), you’ve migrated your content to the new site, and you’re just about ready to launch. Time to breathe a sigh of relief and watch as your users enjoy the new site, right? Not so fast! Before you launch your new site, there are a few things you need to consider.

We’ve often found that a website project’s stakeholders don’t think about their site’s performance metrics and whether their new site will be able to handle the traffic that it receives. This is understandable; there’s a lot to consider when launching a new website, so it’s natural to think that what has been working will continue to work.

However, if your digital marketing efforts (which include your newly redesigned site) are truly successful, you’ll need to be ready for a lot of people to be accessing your site at the same time. That’s the goal you’re shooting for, right?

In order to make sure your site will work correctly when receiving this increase in traffic, you’ll need to perform load testing that will simulate the amount of traffic you expect to receive and ensure that there is no decrease in the site’s performance. In order to ensure that your site will be ready, this load testing needs to take place on the production server which the site will be running on after it goes live, rather than in a development environment.

How can you determine the right amount of traffic to test? One good way to do this is to look at your Google Analytics data and find the highest amount of single day traffic in the past three years, then set this as the baseline performance number for your site. This will ensure that it will be able to handle your busiest days of traffic once it has launched.  Learn more about how your website speed can impact your website traffic.

If these tracking tools are not in place before you go live, you might miss out on some crucial data about how people are using your new site, such as the number of pages users visit and the amount of time they spend on each page. You want to be able to measure this data from the moment your new site launches to ensure you’re meeting your goals and key performance indicators (KPIs).

One common issue that gets overlooked when launching a new site is the DNS settings that determine how quickly people across the world will be able to access your new site. The Time to Live (TTL) setting on your domain determines how long it takes for changes to that domain to propagate across the internet. If the TTL for your domain is a long amount of time, such as 24 hours, it may take up to that long for people to be able to access your new site after it goes live.

When you’re about to launch your new site, it is a good idea to set the TTL on your domain to 5 minutes. This means that when you’re ready to go live, the new site will be available to everyone across the world faster, but it also provides a safety net, allowing you to quickly revert back to your old site in case anything goes wrong.

Ensuring that links are redirected correctly is extremely important, because broken links will result in penalties to your search rankings, making it harder for people to find you in online searches. Unfortunately, it is much easier to fall in search rankings than it is to regain your former position, so resolving any issues with broken links before your new site goes live will ensure that you are not fighting an uphill battle to achieve the search rankings you deserve.

Pro Tip: If your vendor or an outside consultant is setting up redirects, it is a good policy to “trust but verify.” Once the redirects are in place, you should make sure to test at least 50 URLs of pages throughout your site to ensure that they are working correctly.

One issue that site owners often encounter after launching a new site is the level of support that they receive. Once the site is live, the development team often hands support off to a separate team to handle any issues that may arise. This is not ideal, since this support team doesn’t have the same level of knowledge of the site as the developers who built it, and resolving issues may take extra time as the support team communicates with the developers to determine the best solutions

Before launching your new site, it is important to ensure that each of the stakeholders and the entire development team who built the site are available during and after the launch to ensure continuity of service. Quickly resolving any issues that may arise during this time is critical, so you need to be certain that you will have the resources in place to do so. Ensuring that you have this level of critical care available can make a big difference in the success of your new site.

For instance, if you find that some content was not migrated correctly, you will be able to quickly and easily export it from the old site and import it into your new site. Or, if you find that some links are not redirecting correctly, you can check the links on the old version of the site to ensure that they are pointing to the correct pages on the new site. Keeping this copy of your old site available is a great way to review what had been working in the past while you continue to use your new site to move toward the future.

While launching a new website may seem like the final step in a long journey, it is really just the next stage of an ongoing process. Following these critical steps during and after the launch will go a long way toward ensuring that your new site meets your business goals and provides you with the ROI you are looking for.