Launching a website is an exciting time in any website project. After months and months of design, coding, and populating you can finally share the final product with the general public. It is during this exciting time that one must still pump the breaks and follow the necessary pre-launch steps to ensure that the website is truly ready to be shared. 

Here at Yelling Mule, we break this stage of the process down into multiple checklists. These checklists are put in place to ensure every detail is accounted for. In this blog post, we are highlighting the key six sections that make up our pre-launch checklist and sharing a few tasks that take place within that section. 

Populating

Populating is the first section found on YM’s pre-launch checklist. In this section, our developers review the entire website to make all content is formatted correctly. This can include, optimizing all home photos, testing header/footer links, and hooking up social feeds to the site. Another key element in this portion of the list is checking to make sure there is a privacy policy for the site. A privacy policy is one of the most important pages on a website because it states how your site collects, handles, and processes the visitors’ data.  

SEO

SEO is another vital part of the pre-launch checklist. For those who aren’t familiar, SEO stands for search engine optimization. The elements found in this portion of the list enables your website’s content to be optimized so search engines will show it as a top result for certain keywords. A key plugin our web developers look for before launching is YOAST. YOAST is an SEO plugin for WordPress and helps sites be more visible online. 

Design 

During this portion of the checklist, our developers are looking to make sure all of the designs of the website look and function correctly. Front- end coding is checked along with how the website looks via mobile and tablet. Having a mobile-friendly website is extremely important and can influence your site’s SEO performance. 

Forms

Forms are another important part of the pre-launch checklist. There are a number of key forms your sites need to have before it is ready to launch. A few of them include but are not limited to confirmations, Honeypot, Mailchimp, CRM, and other notifications like thank you pages. 

Pre-Launch 

True to the name this section covers a number of pre-launch checklist items. One of the most significant ones includes making sure the website’s Google Analytics is installed. Google Analytics allows you to track how people discover your website and where they go when they are on the site. This insight is extremely valuable no matter the company or industry.

Post- Launch 

This is the final section of the pre-launch checklist. Our developers look for a number of things including login screen colors, the login logo, and that all beta links are removed.