What happens when your new custom website design goes live.

Checklists are an important part of the process when creating every custom website.

When it comes to your website, we deal with checklists from the routine to complex. With so many moving parts, creating a checklist assures nothing is missed.

Building a website certainly isn’t brain surgery, and no one’s life is in the hands of an web developer—thank goodness. But, our client’s business and livelihood can most certainly be in our hands, and without something as simple as a checklist for their new website could disastrous for their SEO, SEM or customer service.

It’s exciting when a new custom website design goes live.

When a new website goes live, there are factors that can be controlled: URLs will change, Page Titles and Meta Descriptions need to be rewritten, and SEO for new pages. As well as 301 redirects for pages that have new URLs. (If someone bookmarked a page on your old site and the URLS have changed, that link will no longer work.)

These changes, big and small, can create major issues if not addressed before the new swebite goes live.

If left unchecked, folks who find your site through a Google search, might navigate to a page that Google has indexed, but no longer exists. That’s when the user is hit with the dreaded “Page not found” page.

Make your Page Not Found landing page entertaining.

This is what web developers call a 404 page, and it doesn’t have to be boring. On many of our 404 pages, there could be text telling you that you have come to a page that no longer exists.

A 404 page we love:

A good 404 page can solve a lot of things.

The devil is in the details when a new website goes live. There are so many things to worry about when creating a custom website design, and making it live. There are basic things a web designer or developer must worry about:

• Are there coding errors,
• Does the mobile coding work on phones and tablets,
• Has the SEO been researched properly,
• Is the little copyright year going to update itself after we’ve fallen asleep early on New Years Eve, and missed the ball drop again… for the third year in a row?

Submitting a new sitemap to Google and other search engines.

This problem can easily be solved by submitting a new sitemap to Google and Bing as soon as the new website goes live. This lets Google know there’s been changes to the website and there are new URLs.

However, this doesn’t fix anything. Even though the changes have been submitted to Google, it doesn’t mean they will update their system immediately. It could take days, maybe even a week or longer. In our going live checklist, we have a few more tricks up our sleeve to ensure a smoother transition and better experience for your users.

A going live checklist isn’t supposed to cover those types of things.

Essentially, once 99% of the website is done, and the major worries have been taken care of, that 1% can still affect a lot of things—little things.

Depending on the website, that 1% left to do, could be a dozen, yet very important tasks. For example, the little things in the contact forms are critical:

• Are all contact forms emailing the right people?
• Have they been tested?
• Are they going into your client’s spam folder?
• Are the emails coming from the site labeled correctly, so the client knows right away by the subject line—this is a potential customer who has a question or needs help.

Google Analytics and AdWords.

• Did we make sure to transfer over the Google Analytics to the new site from the old?
• Did we block our IP address on their Google Analytics account, so that when we constantly visit their site to make updates and changes, we aren’t affecting their bounce rate or page views?
• Are there Google AdWords running that point to URLs that might no longer exist? THAT would be a true waste of the client’s money if we let that happen.

There are so many things-big and small-that can be on a “going live checklist.”

From making sure they get a passing grade on Google Speed Insights, to double checking their embedded videos are responsive, and work just as good on a handheld device, as well as a widescreen monitor.

No matter how long or detailed our checklists get, there is always something new, some little bump in the road we never thought of before.

A going live checklist should be ever-evolving.

A good web design company should have a going live checklist that is growing and ever-expanding. An e-commerce website going live checklist would look a lot different than a home builder’s website.

Each checklist should have the tools in it to help their client’s websites launch without any issues, or at least minimize against any major issues.

As mentioned before, there can always be some kind of problem that pops up. Maybe Mercury is in retrograde and you are a Cancer and married to a Scorpio, and a butterfly flapped its wings in the Amazon Rain Forest.

Things do happen, but a good website design company can help them from ever getting out of hand, or even better—before anyone could even notice.

An example of one of our going live checklist includes:

1. If possible, make sure the new site is on the same server as the live site, and is under a staging sub-domain, e.g., staging.sevell.com.
2. Make sure all URLs match the live site. If they cannot match or follow the same hierarchy, then we must create 301 redirects for each of the new URL paths.
3. Be sure the new site is updated with the Google Analytics tracking codes.
4. After going live, make sure to update the sitemap on Google Search Console.
5. Is the mobile version working properly on different devices and browsers?
6. Does the desktop version have any bugs across any of the most popular browsers?
7. Also, be sure everything sizes down properly on tablets.
8. Have we created a custom 404 page that is informative, and possibly a little creative and fun?
9. Has the site been tested for fast loading speeds? Are we getting a passing grade on Google PageSpeed Insights?
10. Test all webform notifications. Make sure the client is receiving the notification emails, and none of them are going to their spam folder.
11. Maybe sure we’ve activated any necessary spam blockers for each form. We typically just use Honeypot, until spam becomes too aggressive.
12. Test all required webform fields are working or validating. Typically we will tap the submit button without filling out any of the fields. This should trigger a “required fields” error response.
13. Does each webform have a Thank You message once the form is submitted?
14. Also, make sure we have Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate installed and the domain is force directed to HTTPS.
15. Is WPRocket installed, activated and configured. WPRocket will compress JS and CSS files and if required—is the CDN subscription paid for and running properly.
16. Have we copied over or re-written all of the SEO?
17. Are we going to break any SEM campaigns?
18. Does the client have a CDN service like CloudFlare? Do we have access, and do we need to make any DNS changes or updates?
19. Check with their SEO/SEM folks to make sure any tracking codes need to be updated or cleaned up. Sometimes older sites can get congested with old and outdated tracking codes. These can slow down the website, so removing them can also help to boost performance.
20. Are there any plugins or themes we can deactivate and remove?
21. Check the WordPress “Health” under the Tools section of the backend. Here we can see if the the health status has any recommendations for us to fix.
22. Be sure the PHP version is the most up-to-date and stable version.
23. Also, make sure the MySQL database is running version 8.0 if possible.
24. Make sure the Timezone, Date Format and Time Format has been configured correctly.
25. Once we go live, be sure to clear and caches, CDN storage and then navigate to “Permalinks” and click the Save Changes button.
26. Within the C-Panel of the server host, make a manual copy of the new site for semi-permanent storage.
27. Create a new sub-domain called for example “old.sevell.com” and make a copy of the live site for safe-keeping. This is important, because if we missed anything, the old site will always be accessible.
28. If the client has an “Acessibe” subscription, make sure the code is running on the site, and the icon is loading properly and is branded with their colors.

If your website is your main marketing tool…

…and it’s a reflection of your company, make sure your web design firm has a list like this so the launch of your website goes smoothly. Contact us if you have other questions.