Congrats on getting your website designed and built for launch. Take these tips into account to ensure you have a great website launch. Here is How to Prepare your Website Launch in 2022.
If your website is built on WordPress, check your settings to verify that your website does not have “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” enabled. You can find this setting under “Settings -> Reading Settings”
Enabling this setting will prevent your website from showing up on Google and other search engines.
Install Google Analytics to your website to collect data on website traffic which you can use to analyze your marketing efforts.
You can easily install Google Analytics on your website by using the Google Sitekit plugin made by Google.
If you used a demo import functionality when building your website, there will be sample pages/posts created from this process. Make sure to delete these pages/posts as they will be indexed by Google.
Make sure to purchase an SSL certificate from your hosting provider to enable an HTTPS connection on your website. This will protect your user's data when using your website.
You can use the Really Simple SSL plugin to get the certificate installed to your website.
Also, if you have multiple domains, then make sure you have them connected to your current website host. You can also use a redirect to the main domain to improve SEO rankings for the main domain.
A sitemap makes it easier for search engines to crawl your web pages. This will help improve your SEO and is essential when developing your SEO strategy.
You can install Yoast SEO to your website which provides a sitemap feature.
Before launching your website, you should do testing on multiple browsers and devices such as desktop and mobile.
You should check different operating systems such as Windows/MACOS and for mobile, you should check your website on both iOS and Android. This is to ensure that your website looks as expected across all these platforms.
Install a security plugin to protect your website from hackers and malicious users. We recommend using the Securi Security plugin to keep your website safe and secure.
Keep your website safe also by keeping your plugins and theme files updated as some plugins may have security vulnerabilities.
You should have backups enabled on your website so you can revert back to a prior working/secure version of your website if necessary.
Your hosting provider should have a backup service or you can use the Updraft plugin which does website backups through WordPress. We recommend getting the backups done directly through your hosting provider just in case you can’t access your WordPress admin.
So those are our 8 tips for a successful website launch. If you need help with your website launch, you can contact us at MapilitMedia Inc.
