website tips_
Launching your own website is an exciting experience. Whether you are promoting a new business, service, or product, your website can have a big influence on your success. It’s important that you run your site through a website checklist before you go live.
To help make your website launch as smooth as possible, we have created this helpful checklist. Before you say, “blast off”, grab a coffee and take a few minutes to run your site through this web checklist.
1: Proofread for Small Errors
Your website needs to make a positive impression, and the little details can have a big impact on your viewers. Before you turn your creation into a live website, go through each page and proofread every piece of content. As you are doing this, ask yourself the following questions:
- Is your content easy to read with short sentences, bullet points and plenty of white space?
- Are your images optimised, correctly labelled and do they contain alt text?
- Are your video and audio files working properly?
Checking a website for errors can turn prospects into profits. Check, check and check again!
2: Check your Website’s Usability
Once you have perfected (and checked, checked, and checked!) your content, you need to make sure that all the functional aspects of your website are working properly. Remember that usability is just as important for conversions as it is for SEO. Put yourself in the shoes of your customers and imagine you are visiting your website for the first time.
To test usability, follow this website checklist:
- Are your images optimised for speed?
- Does the call to action and contact form work properly?
- If you are launching a multi-user site, check the login procedure and credentials.
- Are your autoresponders responding as you intended?
- If your website accepts payments, conduct a test run of each step in the payment process. This should include shopping cart functions, payment processing, and email notifications.
3: Check Your Website is Mobile-Friendly
With Google’s focus on mobile-first indexing, testing your website for compatibility with mobile devices is a crucial part of any website launch checklist. To put it simply, your website must be just as pleasing and functional on mobiles as it is on desktops. The text should be easy to read, the content should be the same on both versions of your website and the navigation should be easy.
4: Review Your Browser Compatibility
Your website may run like clockwork from your browser, but how does it work on different versions of major browsers? At the bare minimum, you will need to test it on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. In addition, you should also run compatibility testing to ensure all your plugins run smoothly alongside each other.
5: Confirm Your SSL
Did you know that without an SSL certificate, your website runs the risk of being classed as “not secure”? When going through your live website checklist, make sure you remember to add an SSL certificate to your site.
If you want your business to be successful, at one point or another, you will need to take the leap and launch a website. With a lot of pressure to get it right, it has never been more important to follow a website checklist.
We are here to help you to make the most out of your site. Contact our friendly team today here and we will be happy to help.
