 What should you do before you launch your website? We've got the checklist here on the journey. Getting ready to launch a new website for your business. Congratulations, that's awesome. Launching the website is always an exciting time. You've put in all the hard work. Now you get to show it off to the world and start receiving visitors. However, it can also be a very stressful time. How do you know that you haven't forgotten something important or a task that might cause problems down the line? And that's why I use the checklist from Human for every build that I do for my clients. And if you wanna see and use the full checklist, you can go to human.com slash checklist. All right, that's pretty cool using a checklist, but let's dive into that a little bit more. Why is having a website checklist essential? Well, I think there's always a series of common tasks that you have to do with every single website that you launch, whether it's your own or it's for your client. And basically the best practice that every website that needs to follow, whether you're building your first website or your 500 site, remembering all of these different tasks can be a chore, which is where a checklist comes into. Keep you in check. A disclaimer though, depending on the platform you're building your website on, some of these steps are already done for you. So without further ado, let's get into our website launch checklist for new websites. First thing on our checklist, content. One of the first things you'll want to do with double check, triple check the content. After all, it's the main reason you built this website in the first place. So a couple things to keep an eye out for. Ensure all text is free of spelling errors. Make sure you have a 404 page. Make sure that the placeholder text is removed. Footer includes copyright statement, just a list of you. Next in our checklist is SEO and analytics. So SEO titles and meta descriptions are important for helping your site rank in search engines. They can also help you increase your organic search, click through rate by persuading someone to click on it. So things to keep in mind with this section is make sure your page titles are descriptive and SEO friendly. All page titles are unique. Unique in New York, they have to be different. Metadata included and appropriate. H1s are used for page titles and there's only 81 H1 per page. You can use, kind of sprinkle out the different heading tags to the rest of the page content itself. XML sitemap has been generated and added to the root of the website. It's typically your domain slash sitemap.xml. If using WordPress, the popular plugin Yoast will help you generate this for you. Website can be accessed by search engines. So if this is a development site and you block search engines from crawling because it's just in a chaotic state, make sure you remove that no index, no follow for those pages. And Google analytics and relevant analytics tracking tools have been installed. Next on the checklist and nearly I got this one. Social, make sure that your social media accounts are there and also easy to find. Also ensure that the links are the correct URLs. Believe it or not, I still go to websites and I'm excited to check out their Instagram. I go to click dead end. So make sure you got the correct URLs there and use API for integrations. Next up on our checklist is accessibility. And this is something that can often be overlooked. So a website needs to make sure that it meets the appropriate level of ADA and WCAG compliance. Links are clearly recognizable. Images use appropriate alt text. Forms have a logical layout. Color contrast is tested. And website accessibility has been checked with ace.accessible.com. Next up, responsiveness. So make sure your website displays and functions correctly in Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Microsoft Edge displays and functions correctly on mobile tablets and on large resolutions. Exactly. And next up we have functionality. Before going live, you wanna make sure that your forms are working as expected. Something that I forget to do time and time again is update my client's forms from my email address to their email address after I'm done testing. So make sure you have that kind of squared away. But go ahead and just test them to make sure they process correctly. But the required fields have been tested. Review the input validation for the minimum and max character links. If it's a telephone input, make sure only phone numbers can be inputted and things like that. Like I said earlier, the forms send to the correct recipient, not yourself. If you're doing this for a client and then website search and search results function correctly. One of my favorite little quick searches is to go onto Google type site colon and then the domain name and it'll show up all of the different pages related to that domain name. So you can quickly see what the sites looks like on search engines just to make sure that it functions correctly. Let's talk about optimization. Very important on your checklist, how quickly your site loads will definitely affect everything from the user experience to SEO, search engine optimization, conversion rates for your business and a ton more. But for that reason, optimization is an essential ingredient if you want your website to be successful. So some checklist within that checklist item, make sure your images have been optimized there. Ensure only necessary fonts, weights and character sets are installed. Another good thing to keep in mind, run Google speed test. I know Neely loves to mention that or advise that and optimize accordingly. Also incorporate CDN, so caching is required. Next in our checklist, it has to do with security. So securing your site is one great strategy to help make sure you don't need to worry about your site as much. We don't want to make it keep you up at night. We want to have you sleep soundly and focus on the rest of your business. So secure areas are locked down and not accessible by search engine. So like the WP admin, for instance, the default CMS login URL is changed. A great security tip, especially for WordPress is to change the domain slash WP dash admin to something different and more secure. The default CMS username is changed. Make sure your username is not admin or administrator. That's a big no-no SSL certificates successfully installed as well, just to make sure that your site is secure and you're not getting deemed by search engines. Last but not least, post launch. Look, just because you hit publish doesn't mean that you're done. There's still plenty of work to be done here long after the site goes live. For example, you'll want to ensure that the site is visible to search engines, also images, media and links reference live URL, web fonts integrated and are working correctly on the live site. Also generate a new sitemap.xml and upload to root. And when you're launching a website, there are a lot of little things that you need to remember and even if you're an expert, it can be hard to feel confident and you haven't forgotten anything. Using a checklist is the answer. If you verify and perform all the items in this checklist, you can be sure that your site is ready to open its doors to visitors. Now get out there and launch your website. While you're at it, make sure you like this video and drop a comment below on if you have a checklist yet or not. 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