Here at Elite Strategies we are all about the 3 P’s of consulting: people, process, and product. People, the people that make and optimize websites. Product, the website or app itself. And finally process, the process we’ve designed to carry out essential tasks. Today we are going to talk a little bit about 1 of these P’s and that is process, specifically the process of making a website live. From the very first call we make with a client to the project management phase, our process is clearly laid out in black and white.
If you’ve ever been involved in making a website “live” then you know this can be an arduous process. Developers get nervous, project managers get finicky, and clients are generally about one step away from pulling their hair out. In an attempt to mitigate some of this stress, we’ve developed an in-house checklist to use whenever we make a website live or transfer to a different host. Over the years we’ve modified this checklist and come out with several different versions (landing page, eCommerce, small business) but have more or less settled on a “general” version. We initially published this in 2015 and have now settled on what we consider a final version in 2019.
Even for smaller websites these days, there is a lot that could go wrong during the website transfer process. Also a lot of times even the savviest of professional website development companies will forget something, in a rush to make a website live. Whatever the case, we wanted to share this with you. You can download a PDF at the bottom of this post. Before we do, let’s review a few of the main categories. We broke up this checklist into 4 main categories:
- General
- eCommerce (if applicable)
- Beta Testing
- WordPress / CMS
- SEO
- Transfer Specific
If you are big into CRO / PPC or things like email marketing landing pages I suppose you might add a section for that as well but for most websites this will do just fine.
Website Live Checklist: 6 Parts
General
The first part of the website live checklist focuses on compatibility and functionality from a general perspective. Making sure it works with different browsers, operating systems and other devices. We dig into spell and grammar checking and give it a solid “stress test” to see if it breaks. If SSL is in the picture, we’ll test that too.
During this time we like to start off with a basic sitemap, and click through each page. We ask someone who has not been involved in the development or assembly of the website to click through the website and look for glaring details. Note, this is not the time to bring up design or UX ideas, save those for later. Remember, your website is never “done” it can always be updated, changed, tested, or modified.
After you’ve clicked through all the pages and posts, start by filling out forms, testing live chat boxes and making sure it works on all devices. It helps if you have an office with a lot of different devices such as Macs / Windows / Androids / iPhones if not there are lots of tools to help with this.
You get the idea. There is always “that one guy” who has a Packard Bell PC from 2004 running IE version 6 that wonders why the menu doesn’t drop down :).
eCommerce
If it is an eCommerce website, we’ll normally do several ‘test orders’ just to make sure things are working. We use an actual credit card and actually ship the product to test this process from A-Z. The test order phase will generally weed out most of the issues, but we still do a few other tests as well. We make sure all receipts and confirmation emails are being sent, that all the categories are in the right place, and all sorting options are working correctly.
This part can get really tricky, especially when you have products with multiple options, multiple merchants, multiple shipping options and lots of preferences. It might take a few weeks to pull out some of these bugs, this is why we recommend putting a site in beta mode until you get the kinks worked out, but this isn’t always possible.
Beta Testing
This is a small section, it basically makes sure the site works and is fully operational. This process normally just involves going through each page and making sure it works. You can also look for any sort of anomaly or weird issues that might crop up. The entire launch process is sort of beta testing so that is why this section is a bit small, but necessary to do being that it can get overlooked.
WordPress / CMS
Sometime last year we added a “WordPress” section since we do so many sites in WordPress. This is where we see a lot of other companies slip up, especially by forgetting to delete old websites and other common pitfalls. It’s also a great idea to slim down as much as possible, without removing the actual functionality of the website. We like to keep the front end portion of the website running smoothly, but we also like to optimize the back-end as well.
This is also a good time to check your versions. Make sure WP is updated to the latest version. Do you have a child theme installed? Is your theme up to date? Are your plugins up to date? Are you using vulnerable plugins? As of now, there are over 5000 vulnerabilities in WordPress, so make sure to check that out. We also recommend hardening your WordPress installation, more on that later.
SEO
Ideally you want to integrate most of the SEO techniques into the website prior to launch, but as most of you know this isn’t always possible due to several reasons (time constraints, budget, size of website etc). Whenever possible, we try to make this happen. If not, the sooner the better. By no means is this meant to be an all inclusive on-page SEO guide (but if you need one of those, you can checkout our on-page SEO guide). During this process, we’ll do basic stuff like title tags and meta descriptions, permalink beautification, and Google Analytics. We’ve worked on 5 page websites and 500,000 page websites, so again all of this depends on time, budget, and size.
Transfer Specific
Doing a site launch on a brand new shiny server is one thing, but moving a development site to a live server (and overwriting / deleting an existing site) is quite a different process. In this section we mainly make sure that the dev server is compatible with the live server and that everything is good to go.
Again, this list is by no means comprehensive. There are many factors that come into play when making a website live that simply can’t be templated:
- is it a brand new domain or a transfer?
- is an old website being “deleted”
- is it simply a “re-theme”
- are we changing the type of server (Nginix > Lightspeed)
- is there app or CRM integration?
We use a lot of other tips and tricks we’ve picked up over the years. One of which is running a Screaming Frog audit on the sandbox site to do a full title and meta tag audit. This way, we can get a baseline of all the title tags and meta descriptions (as well as Hx tags etc) and fully scrape the website. In the future you can go back and check to see how many pages there are, and see how your Googlebot crawl budget is going.
Depending on the scenario, a given website might take 30 seconds to make live, or 30 days. One thing I like to tell people is a quote from Wired.com in 2015 when they did a (very major) website redesign project:
“But we didn’t design the new WIRED [website] to be perfect. We designed it to be perfected. “
Implementation
One method that I’ve seen employed in the past is to have the checklist done departmentally i.e:
Website Developers > General Section / Ecom
Content Writers > WordPress Section
SEO’s: > SEO section
This method employs group accountability, and each department focuses on what they do best. Remember, making a website live is a process, not an event. Most websites are in a constant state of being modified, updated and changed so if you are waiting for a website to be “done” you will be waiting a long time.
Feel free to download and print the image herein, or download a Microsoft Excel version of our website live checklist. If you have any suggestions, let us know on @elitestweets
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| Task | Description | Complete |
|---|---|---|
| General | ||
| Favicon | Website has favicon installed | |
| Browser Compatibility | Website works on Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc | |
| OS Compatibility | Website works on Mac, Windows, Linux etc | |
| Mobile Friendly | Website passed Google mobile friendly check | |
| Proofread | Spelling & grammar errors addressed | |
| Links | Dev links removed, 404’s | |
| Backed up | Website is backed up | |
| Email Forms | Emails are being delivered to the correct email | |
| Stress Test | Can website handle multiple concurrent visitors? | |
| Dummy content | All lorem ipsum removed | |
| Images | No copywrited images used | |
| JavaScript | Does website work with JS off? | |
| W3C Validated | Does website pass W3C test? | |
| SSL | is SSL installed correctly? | |
| Website speed | test site speed | |
| Call tracking | is properly tracking calls / forms | |
| Passwords saved | in password management tool | |
| Client communication | sent website transfer agreement | |
| Dev site | full backup / archive and deleted (48 hrs after making live) | |
| eCommerce | ||
| test cart checkout | do full cart checkout process beta and live | |
| receipts | does customer get a receipt? | |
| money / merchant | does customer get paid? | |
| SSL | ensure SSL properly enabled esp on checkout | |
| invoicing | if applicable | |
| ecom photos | all looking good | |
| CRM integration | integration tested | |
| Beta Testing | ||
| Beta Tested | Performed beta test to see if works correctly | |
| Receipt | Customers receive receipt | |
| Confirmation emails | Customers receive confirmation emails | |
| WordPress | ||
| Unused Pages / Posts | Any unused pages and posts should be deleted | |
| Dummy content | Any dummy content including images removed | |
| Plugins | Unused plugins deleted, all plugins updated | |
| Theme | Unused plugins deleted, all themes updated | |
| Framework | WordPress framework up to date | |
| Security | wp-login, attempts, db, admin user, etc (refer to full guide) | |
| Baseline SEO (refer to full SEO guide) | ||
| Google Analytics | Installed and verified working | |
| Google Search Console | Installed | |
| On-Page | Titles, Metas, etc | |
| Open Graph | Installed including Twitter Card / OGP | |
| Schema | Basic JSON-LD added | |
| NOINDEX | Ensure noindex tag is removed | |
| Robots.txt | Installed | |
| Permalinks | Permalinks beautified | |
| Image Optimization | Properly sized, compressed etc | |
| CDN | If needed / wanted | |
| Transfer Specific | ||
| PHP | Version and library compatible | |
| Webserver | .htaccess compatibility, etc | |
| MYSQL | version compatibility /myisam / innodb | |
| permissions | check permissions of CMS | |
| HTTP2 / HSTS | base check | |
| Domain | A record or Nameserver? (final) | |
| DNS | Can the whole world see me? |
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