Website Launch Checklist

A checklist of tasks to do before launching a public website.
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Table Of Contents

• Checklist
  • Pre-Launch
  • Post-Launch
  • Launch
  • Ongoing
• Suggestions
• Copyright and Attribution

Checklist

Launch preparation generally takes a day or more. You should also reserve a day for bugfixing after you have wrapped the last feature. Be sure to plan accordingly!

Pre-Launch

• Content and Style

  • Typography and layout

    • Check for incorrect punctuation marks, particularly apostrophes, quotation marks and hyphens/dashes

    • Check headings for where you could potentially use ligatures

    • Check for widow/orphan terms in important paragraphs

• Spelling and grammar

• Consistency

  • Capitalisation (especially of main headings)

  • Tense/Style of writing

  • Recurring/common phrases (e.g. ‘More about X’ links)

  • Variations in words (e.g. Websites vs Web Sites, or UK vs US spelling)

  • Treatment of bulleted lists (e.g. periods or commas at end of each item)

• Check for hard-coded links to staging domain (i.e. ensure all links will change to ‘live’ URL/domain when site is launched)

• Ensure no test content on site

• Check how important pages (e.g. content items) print

• For re-designs, ensure important old/existing URLs are redirected to relevant new URLs, if the URL scheme is changing

• Check all ‘Hidden Copy’ (e.g. alt text, transcriptions, text in JavaScript functions)

• Standards and Validation

  • Accessibility
  • HTML validation
  • JavaScript validation
  • CSS validation

• Search Engine Visibility, SEO and Metrics

  • Disable Indexing On Development Server

  • Page Titles are important; ensure they make sense and have relevant keywords in them.

  • Create metadata descriptions for important pages.

  • Check for canonical domain issues (e.g. variations in links to http://site.com http://www.site.com http://www.site.com/index.html should be reduced to a single consistent style)

  • Ensure content is marked-up semantically/correctly (h1, etc.)

  • Check for target keyword usage in general content

  • Check format (user/search engine friendliness) of URLs

  • Set up Analytics, FeedBurner, and any other packages for measuring ongoing success

  • Create an XML Sitemap

  • Configure Google Webmaster Console and Yahoo! Site Explorer

  • Sharing & Rich Snippets

    • Create a share card using Photopea or a similar tool

    • Set up Facebook meta tags & validate here

    • Set up Twitter meta tags & validate here

  Facebook Tag

  <meta property="og:type" content="website">
  <meta property="og:site_name" content="${SITE_NAME}">
  <meta property="og:description" content="${SITE_DESCRIPTION}">
  <meta property="og:image" content="${SHARE_CARD_URL}">
  <meta property="og:title" content="${PAGE_TITLE}">
  <meta property="og:url" content="${PAGE_URL}">

  Twitter Tag

  <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">
  <meta name="twitter:site" content="${SITE_NAME}">
  <meta name="twitter:creator" content="${SITE_AUTHOR}">
  <meta name="twitter:description" content="${SITE_DESCRIPTION}">
  <meta name="twitter:image" content="${SHARE_CARD_URL}">
  <meta name="twitter:title" content="${PAGE_TITLE}">
  <meta name="twitter:url" content="${PAGE_URL}">

• Functional Testing

  • Check all bespoke/complex functionality

  • Check search functionality (including relevance of results)

  • Check on common variations of browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome etc.), version (6, 7, 2.2, 3.1 etc.) and platform (Windows, OSX, Linux)

  • Check on common variations of Screen Resolution

  • Test all forms (e.g. contact us, blog comments), including anti-spam features, response emails/text, etc.

  • Test without JavaScript, Flash, and other plug-ins

  • Check all external links are valid

  • Run the site through Google's PageSpeed Insights

  • Write a script to load test your site

  • Check out Locust for this. See LA Metro Councilmatic for a basic example.

• Printer Friendliness

  Dynamic sizing, dark backgrounds, and interactivity don't play well with printers.

  • Pick one option to solve this:

    • Make a print stylesheet using a @media print {} media query, then add it to your site with <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/print.css" media="print">
    • OR
    • Use your browser's dev tools to remove offending elements (like sticky footers), alter colors where needed, and [screenshot the entire page] (https://stackoverflow.com/a/14830242).

  • Add a link to the printer-friendly version to your website.

• Browser and mobile compatibility

  • Use BrowserStack to confirm that your site is compatible with the browsers you wish to support

  • Using BrowserStack's mobile device emulators and/or your own mobile device, confirm that:

    • Scrolling is easy

    • Nav bar works

    • Hoverable things are tappable

    • Charts and maps look ok

• Security/Risk

  • Configure backup schedule, and test recovery from backup.

  • Protect any sensitive pages (e.g. administration area)

  • Use robots.txt where necessary

• Security/Penetration test

  • Turn-off verbose error reporting

  • Check disk space/capacity

  • Set-up email/SMS monitoring/alerts (e.g. for errors, server warnings); consider internal and external monitoring services

• Performance

  • Load test

  • Check image optimisation

  • Check and implement caching where necessary

  • Check total page size/download time

  • Minify/compress static (JavaScript/HTML/CSS) files

  • Optimise your CSS: use short image paths; make full-use ‘cascading’ nature of CSS, etc.

  • Check correct database indexing

  • Check configuration at every level (Web server, Database, any other software e.g. Content Management System)

  • Configure server-based logging/measurement tools (e.g. database/web server logging)

• Finishing Touches

  • Create custom 404 & 500 & other error pages

  • Favicons

    • Create a favicon

    • Add favicons and Apple touch icons (http://www.favicomatic.com/)

Post-Launch

• Marketing

  • Social Marketing: Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, Facebook, Stumbleupon, etc.

  • Submit to search engines

  • Set-up PPC/Google Adwords where necessary

  • Check formatting of site results in SERPs

Launch

• Deployment

  • Create a production deployment

  • Double check that production-level resources have been provisioned

  • Purchase your domain and create the DNS record to point it at your production deployment

  • Ensure HTTPS / SSL is correctly set.

• Web Search Indexing

  • Allow indexing of your production site

  • Redirect the www subdomain to your root domain

  • Set a canonical URL to prevent duplicate search results

• Google Analytics

  • Create a Google Analytics account (if you do not have one)

  • Add the Google Analytics script to your site

  • Set up Google Webmaster Tools and verify site

  • Link Webmaster Tools to Google Analytics

Ongoing

• Monitor and respond to feedback (direct feedback, on Social Media sites, check for chatter through Google, etc.)

• Check analytics for problems, popular pages etc. and adjust as necessary

• Update content

• Optional: Set up relevant Goals and Funnels in Google Analytics

Suggestions

We'd love to hear 'em. Open an issue

Copyright and Attribution

Credits To ;

Copyright (c) 2022 MarketingPipeline. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International.

Original Author Of This Checklist