Your website is complete and ready to be launched. But before you make it live, stop and think: are you forgetting a few necessary checks in your eagerness? Here’s a list of 15 things to check before making your website public:
- Titles and Meta Tags – Page title is not only important for SEO, but it tells the user what a page is about. Page titles should ideally change with each different page and must relate to that page’s content.
Although meta keywords and meta description tags have little importance in SEO for major search engines, they should still be included. Meta descriptions must be different on each different page and relate to that page’s content. Meta descriptions are important because search engines often display the description in search results. - Proofread Content – Check your content one more time before launching your site. Get someone to read it, preferably someone who doesn’t yet know about your product. There will always be something to pick up on from his/her feedback. Revise content and see if you can make modifications, reduce, break, or add text to make your idea more comprehendible to first-time users.
Check dynamic texts on your website too. - Check Functionality – Test your site thoroughly before making it live. Do your contact forms, subscriptions forms, shopping carts, search functions, member log-ins and registration areas, etc, work correctly?
- Graceful Degradation – Check if your site works with JavaScript turned off, because personal computers often have JavaScript disabled for security reasons. Also test any AJAX features on your site.
- Links – Search engines hate broken links, and users find them frustrating. Don’t just assume all your links will work because they are in place. Check them before you make your website live. The last think you’d want is for users to click on a call to action link and be redirected to a 404 error.
Make your links prominent to users by using link colors that stand out against your page’s background. Make sure you code a different color for visited links; you don’t want users clicking on the same links repeatedly. Also, avoid underlining text that is not a link. - Defensive Design – A 404 page will be displayed if your users request a page that does not exist. By providing a 404 page that directs the users to your home page or suggests another page, you are stopping users from exiting your site.
When you are validating your forms, check by submitting information that is unusual like letters in number fields and vice versa, lots of characters, etc. If there is an error on submission, error messages should help users fix incorrect entry. - Sitemap – Don’t forget to add the sitemap.xml file to your root directory before website launch. Sitemap.xml points major search engine crawlers to pages of your website, thus helping search engines easily index your site. Your sitemap.xml should be uploaded to a location in your root directory so it appears as www.abc.com/sitemap.xml.
If you are using WordPress, install Google XML Sitemaps plug-in to automatically update your sitemap whenever you post new write-ups. Uploading your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools tells Google you have a sitemap. - Validation – Neither users nor search engines care much for validation because web pages will still be displayed perfectly without validating codes. However, it’s still a good idea to validate your pages. They not only help debug your codes but also improve the overall quality of your work.
- Analytics – An analytics tools help measure statistics to determine how successfully your site is performing and converting. Google Analytics is a favorite among web owners. Other analytics tools like StatCounter, Kissmetrics and Clicky can also be used.
- RSS Link – If your website has a newsreel or blog, make sure you have an RSS feed for users to subscribe to. Conventionally, a RSS feed icon in the browser’s address bar works, although sidebars work too. To include the RSS feed in your address bar, include this code between heads:
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”Site or RSS title” href=”link-to-feed” /> - Cross-Browser Compatibility – Always check your website on popular browsers like I.E 6, 7, and 8, Chrome, Opera, Safari 3 and Firefox 3 to ensure your website design shows up correctly.
Most web designers you know are trying to combat cross-browser incompatibility and their designs from appearing dislodged across browsers. But cross-browser incompatibility is a disease of the web that isn’t going to get cured anytime soon. Therefore, while your design does not have to be pixel perfect across all browsers, it should at least show up correctly on all browsers. - Optimize – Optimization is a process that multiplies in practice after you have launched your website. However, by ensuring you have employed the basic rules of SEO to your site, you have helped it foray in the right direction.
Make sure your page titles, headers, keyword-rich content, image alts and CSS styles are in place so you can build up on them, along with other SEO practices after your site has been launched. - Back-up – A back-up strategy is crucial, especially if your website runs on database. For a WordPress website, make sure you have installed a WordPress database Backup.
- Print-Style Sheet – Create a print-specific style sheet so that if users want to print your page’s main content, they are able to directly print from your web page without having to copy and paste main content into a text document to avoid navigation and design elements. Use the following code between heads:
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”print.css” media=”print” /> - Fevicon – A Favicon brands the window or tab your website opens in, in a user’s browser. This branding icon is also saved as bookmark when you favorite a web page for quick future access. Some Favicons will be saved in the root directory as favicon.ico depending on your browser. To ensure your website’s Favicon is picked up all the time, use the following code in your head tag:
<link rel=”icon” type=”image/x-icon” href=”/favicon.ico” /> Website Design Hyderabad
Levonsys is a 10 year old – Website Designing and Website Development company in Hyderabad, India and Texas USA. We cater and collaborate with a wide client base and business partners across the globe and offer a galore of services relating to all the sectors in the IT Industry.
Email: sales@levonsys.com | Website: www.levonsys.com
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