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Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website

As ‘digital professionals’ – Web Designers, Developers and Marketers – launching a new website is a daunting task, no matter how often you do it (like B.A.S.E. jumping). There’s lots that can go wrong, and the list of ‘gotchas‘ scales to the size and complexity of the project.

This article is a checklist of common tasks that need to be completed before you hit the “GO” button. A little preparation goes a long way and could save you time and avoid unnecessary costs after you release your website.

Upload a Favicon

The ‘favicon’ appears to the left of the page title in the web browser, and your users will notice if your website doesn’t have one. They give your website credibility and help users navigate to your site when it’s open amongst their other tabs and bookmarks.

Ensuring that your website has a favicon is probably the most basic of any task known to humanity, and yet it’s so frequently overlooked.

STEP ONE: CREATE AN IMAGE

Favicons are often some variant of your organisation’s logo. If you’re the creative type, you can make one for yourself in software such as Photoshop or GIMP. Make sure that your image dimensions are 16×16 pixels (or 32×32 – if you fancy supporting Retina displays) and if you have some sort of transparency, export your favicon as a .png file.

STEP TWO: CONVERT TO .ICO

Favicons are .ico files. If your creative software doesn’t have an “export as .ico” function (*cough* Photoshop *cough*) – do not fear. Here are a couple of great web-based tools to take care of this for you.

favicon.cc – A great little service that allows you to create or upload your own icon for export. Doesn’t support Retina.
favicon-generator.org – Another service, similar to favicon.cc, but with image upload only. To support retina, just click the “Maintain Image Dimensions” checkbox and upload your 32×32 image.

STEP THREE: UPLOAD

Connect to your web server using your favourite FTP client and navigate to the root directory. Upload your new ‘favicon.ico’ here.

OPTIONAL: CODE

While most browsers will automatically look to the root directory for ‘favicon.ico’, some of you may want to specify the location of the favicon in your code. To do this, paste the following in the of your website:

Title and Meta tags

Each page should have a relevant

Whilst the tag isn’t so important for SEO, it’s content is displayed as an excerpt below your page listing in search results.

Code Validation

This is something that you would hope to have worked into your development process, but hey, if you subscribe to Murphy’s Law then this is probably something you should check before launch, and after each update.

The W3 Validator is a free tool from The W3C that will help you make sure your code is up to scratch.

Broken Links

It’s one thing to proofread your content, but do yourself (and your users) a huge favour and check that the links in your website go somewhere meaningful (or somewhere at all).

Again, The W3C have come to the rescue with their W3 Link Checker tool. This service crawls your website and looks for broken links. Pro-tip: enter your development URL and see what comes up (though the Link Checker may not work if your development site is locked down).

Now, it should be mentioned that while the Link Checker is super handy, nothing beats going through your site manually, and actually clicking on the links – especially if you’ve built some custom functionality.

Analytics Tracking

Installing a web analytics tool (like Google Analytics) is critical for recording and measuring website performance and conversion rates.

If you’re in the process of building a replacement for an existing website, be sure not to pollute your data by installing the tracking code on your new website while it’s under development. Equally however, if you’re clever enough to leave out the tracking code, then be clever enough to remember it when it’s time to go live.

Here are a few analytics platforms that you might be interested in:

• Google Analytics
• Piwik
• KISSmetrics
• Statcounter

Page Redirection

If you’re in the process of building a replacement website, it’s likely that pages on the new website don’t exist on the old website – and perhaps even the other way around. Sometimes however, it’s just that the link structure is different. Whatever the case, it’s important to be thorough.

http://example.com/about-us is not the same as http://example.com/about_us.

STEP ONE: INDEXING

Open up this handy Google Spreadsheet (“Page Redirection Sheet“). This will help you index and compare old and new pages.

On each row, give every page a name (for easy reference). Then, list out all of your old pages and try to group them by page category (as in the example). Once you’re done, go through your new website and pair up the old pages with equivalent new pages.

If a page on the new website has a different URL to it’s equivalent page on the old website, then highlight the row in yellow for easy reference.

STEP TWO: REDIRECTING

Once you’ve finished indexing your site in the spreadsheet, open up the .htaccess file in the root directory of your website.

Since you’ve already indexed your site using the spreadsheet, simply locate your highlighted rows and use one of the following redirection rules (one per line):

301 Redirects

Use 301 redirects when you want to permanently redirect the old page to the new page. Example:
Redirect 301 http://www.example.com/about-us/ http://www.example.com/about_us/

302 Redirects

Use 302 redirects when you want to temporarily redirect the old page to the new page. Example:
Redirect http://www.example.com/about-us/ http://www.example.com/about_us/

Sitemap

Adding a sitemap.xml file to the root directory of your website helps the major search engines crawl and index your website. You can use a free tool called XML Sitemaps to build your sitemap for you. Alternatively, if you’ve used the spreadsheet provided in the last section of this article, you can easily build one yourself.

Once you’re happy with your sitemap, upload it to the root directory of your website and use Google Webmaster Tools to let Google know that sitemap has been updated.

Performance Testing

Website performance is absolutely critical to overall user experience, especially given the prevalence of mobile and responsive websites.

This is another one of those things that you really should be doing as part of your development process (before and after launch), but it’s never too late to put your website through it’s paces. Performance can often be optimised by making high value, low effort updates and changes.

Here are some tools that you will find helpful:

• Google PageSpeed Insights
• Pingdom Website Speed Test

RSS Link

If your website has a blog or news section, make sure to include your RSS link in the of your website’s code. This will then show an RSS icon in the address bar of your users’ web browser.

Here’s the code you’ll need:

Backup

Any system administrator worth their salt will tell you that regular, automated backup is important. Nothing is worse than catastrophic data loss, so take a little time out to regularly backup your website’s files and database.

If you’re running WordPress, you can download the “BackUpWordPress” plugin. This plugin allows you to schedule automated website backups that are then emailed to you once they’re done.