 I'll leave this door open for like 30 seconds. My name is Drew Barton. My company is Southern Web. It's a digital marketing agency in Atlanta. I've done this slide deck for you. It's called 30 Things to Do Before Launch. And I've done it because in our agency we support about 445 websites. And with that quality of sites going out the door, it's about two to four sites a week that go out. We had to have some way to regulate the quality of the sites that are going out the door with each time. So the way that you do that, in our case, was to put together a list of things that we were going to do with every site that got launched. So I figured this is such a good thing to share with the other people that are doing WordPress. So I'm going to walk you through this. The talk is 30 minutes. There's 30 things. We're going to do one thing a minute. So we're going to go super fast. But at the very end, you'll have the slides with all the links so that if you have stuff. And so if I do one thing a minute, we'll have 15 minutes to do all your questions. All right. Sounds like a plan. All right. So the first thing with any website launch or even before you get started is the preparation. So getting your things together, your thoughts about the goals and what you want the website to do before you even start to download or install WordPress, really important. So the first thing that I recommend having on that new list is actually having a checklist. How many of you have a checklist? No, no. Okay. So about a quarter of the room has a checklist. I'm going to run through these things. It's really important to ensure quality with every site that goes out the door. The other thing that it's really good for is when you include the checklist in your proposal and you're meeting with your client, they can then use that to see, oh, look at all the things that I get with this particular website that's built versus the competition. It's very helpful in that way. Drew, do you want the lights off? Are you guys able to see or do you want to turn the lights on? It could be better if the lights were dim. All right. I don't know if it has a dimmer. I think it's a 1 or a 0 over there. Okay. Oh, easier. Can you still see it? Okay. All right. So think about in your checklist when you're launching this site, what do you want to have included on it? Do you share it with your clients? Do you share it with the rest of the team? And before the site is launched, do you have a pre-site, pre-launch checklist and then once the site goes up, a second checklist, because there are certain things you can't do until the site is live on the URL. Also, when you do this and you show all the things that are in the checklist, the client can see the things that are not and then ask about them because part of communication with clients is to make sure that you don't want to get involved in that situation where they said, I thought this was included, right? So the checklist helps with adhering to these are the things that you're going to get as part of the deliverable to this project. And then every one of the team is graded on whether they accomplished everything that's on the checklist. Tip two, admin users. Limit them. Everyone in the company doesn't need admin level access. If you're posting blogs to the site, not everyone needs powered, religious and installing plugins or updating the thing. It also creates a security risk when you have every single user at the company or organization with admin level access. Also, make sure that everyone that's working on the website has their own username and password and that username shouldn't be admin. Now we're going to get into SEO, search engine optimization. So link structure. We know in SEO that the default way the WordPress handles permalinks is not the best for SEO. So if you're seeing question marks or people signs in your permalink structure on the site, it's a no-no for SEO purposes. And you'll change that on settings in the permalink sub-name. So a lot of these tips will have a place for it to go. And so if you don't want to take notes, if you get a slide to ask where you can go see where those things are, the light blue bar on most of the panels will tell you where to fix those things. Tip four. This is my favorite. I got a call from someone that says my site's not showing up in Google because your web developer never unchecked a box. So you'll see in the search engine results the robots.txt file is blocking the site from being indexed. Don't want sites with that box checked. You can change that under settings in the reading tab. Or install a plugin for SEO. I'm in the list of which SEO plugin you install, but you should install at least one of them for your clients. Yoast or all-in-one SEO will do the job. You can't rely on fun. The default way that WordPress handles your title tags. Tip six. Title tags are unique for each page. So at the bottom level, you can have your title tags and meta tags just being what is on the content page. Then a step up from there would be to have default title tags and meta tags that are throughout the entire site. And the top level would be having unique ones for each page entitled on the site. So these two sites will help you then index the site to see where you've duplicated those efforts. And tier two, which is where everything is the same, to tier three where everything is unique, these tools will tell you which pages are duplicated. The other thing to check is when you're dealing with the blog categories, oftentimes most people will forget to put title tags and meta descriptions on the blog categories. So that's a good thing to do to help you get further indexing. But those two sites there will help you discover which pages are duplicated. Google Tag Manager. So how many of you are already familiar with what GTMS? Two. Good. All right. So what I like in Google Tag Manager is when you go into a hospital and the first time you come in they give you the IV in the arm. That way the nurse or doctor doesn't come by and pray to you every time they have to give you some medicine. What Google Tag Manager does is it installs this one injection point into your site and you can install every other injection that you need. Whether that be remarketing code or Facebook tracking or Google Analytics, it's all done throughout that one point of contact. So rather than have multiple little snippets of code, you can have this one place and then regulate it. The other thing is you can turn it on and off so it doesn't create code load and cause the cycle load. The third thing is you can see when it's firing, when it's not firing. It's good to have some sort of message if people are telling you that. So you can install that at Google.com. Or it's like analytics. Or it's like Tag. To date, install Google Analytics. There are some people that still don't install Google Analytics. You can't make any decisions about your website, not any educated decisions without having Google Analytics installed. You can't have empirical data of where people are coming into your site and where they're leaving along their stay and what the entry points are. You can't really make any judgment calls on content. You can't make any judgment calls on SEO until you have the Google Analytics installed. The second piece in there is annotate. How many annotate your Google Analytics? Nobody. Good. So annotation happens when you launch your website. Analytics and then Tag put a pin on the date you launched the website. So when you're looking at your Google Analytics over the course of time you can see these pinpoints of each major event that happened in history of your website. So that could be the date your site went live. That could be the date you hired a digital marketing company. That could be the date you sent that email newsletter to your list. So next time when you're looking at these sort of bumps in your chart of traffic you can then say, oh that large bump in my traffic happened because I sent out an email newsletter. Or I hired Joe to start doing SEO for me. So that happened on October 5th and now I can actually track the upward trajectory. So it's really nice to put those annotations in there. If you're installing Google Analytics for the client with that annotation in there we launched the site on this date. 5th and 9th, Google Search Console. Previously called Google Webmaster Tools. So Google Webmaster Tools or Search Console is sort of a dashboard if you will of how your website is performing. So from here you'd be able to submit your XML site map of all the pages of your site. You'll be able to see how many pages of your site have been indexed. You'll be able to see the crawl rate. So let's say your site has 50 pages on it. From the Search Console you'll be able to see that only 25 of them have been indexed or 30. From out of that you can then diagnose how do I get those other 20 pages indexed. More likely than not especially with WordPress is because of a canonicalization issue. Canonicalization is what happens when you have duplicated content. With WordPress you have these archive pages that will display the blog posts where they could display custom post types. That content is what's going to be the same as what's on the single post layer, the individual blog post itself. So if you have this archive page with all the content on it and you also have the single page with the same content on it even if it's just an abstract it'll get flagged for Search Console because they'll say Google's whole motto is show me something I haven't seen already. Tell me something I don't know. So if it's seen that archive page the same content on the single post in WordPress as it is in the archive page it's highly likely that it won't be indexed. So that's where you'll see discrepancy in your Search Console between especially in WordPress sites. The third thing that Search Console does that's really nice is let's say heaven forbid your open source software gets some sort of virus installed on it. Heaven forbid Search Console, when Google gets notified that your site has malware on it will then send you an email saying your site's been infected. That's kind of a nice thing that could happen. That was a bad work choice. Tip 10 redirects You want to create 301 redirects for all the pages on the previous site to the new site because you've done all this work on your old site to get it ranking well. Now you want to make sure that that page about doggie daycare redirects to its new counterpart because if the old counterpart was a .asp page you're not going to be able to recreate that in WordPress. So now you have to create a 301 redirect so that that old content will then go to the new page. When you do that and set it up properly there's no loss of link juice in that old page to the new page. When you don't create those 301 redirects all that good value that you add in the search engine is then lost because it's going to a 404 page that can not be found. The second day after your site goes live you can then go into Search Console and there's a tab to see all your search errors. The biggest search error is going to be your 404 issues. So on day 2, day 3, day 4 after the site goes live you're going to be able to see all those pages that were previously indexed and are now creating 404 errors. This is highly important especially if you like to go into WordPress and play around with your permalinks. So let's say you went to this SEO seminar and you then decided oh I need to change my permalinks to be Jacksonville doggie daycare and the old page was just doggie daycare so all those old pages could be creating 404 errors if you're not setting up the redirect properly. Page 11 or tip 11 this one's high level but it's for the developers in the room make sure they're viewing their JavaScript and their CSS functions in the PHP file and not in the thing in itself. If that went over your head that's okay I got 29 other. Tip 12 test the load time this is one of my favorite tools in the whole wide world. Tools.pingdom.com you take your website and drop it in there and it will tell you your overall load time. Now the problem with this is it's going to get you a score and as Americans we live and die by the scores. We get a B and we think something's wrong with us. Don't worry about the letter grade that you get worry about the announces of what you're seeing if your site is loading and it's larger than 3 megabytes and that's our internal barometer at my company if it's larger than 3 megs it's too heavy. So that usually means that your images or your videos that you have on your homepage or whatever page you're testing and I highly recommend testing more than just the homepage with this to test it to make sure it's under 3 megs as you go down to tools.pingdom.com you're going to see all the resources on the page every single image every single javascript file every single file that's going to be enlisted there. Each resource that is pulling off the server it is possible if you love yourself some plugins that you're going to see some red lines where resources couldn't be loaded so if you're seeing a bunch of those on plugins you're not using anymore that's a sign that you need to uninstall those plugins because each time you're pulling and pinging that other server for that it's slowing down your load time of your own site. Tip 14, that personally has this great site you can pop your website in there and you can see how your website is going to look on pretty much every device for free you don't have to go out and buy any browser testing software by browser stack or anything like that if you're not an agency you can go there and see where your breakpoints are for tablet or smart phone for desktop so that way you can see how it's going to look in all different various devices Tip 15 so it goes for all in one SEO are going to give you an XML site map that's a data file file type that you can then take into search console on google webmaster tools or search console drop it in there and then it will then give the search engine all the pages of your site so they don't have to index the whole site because you're handing them essentially the table of contents of your website the other one to do that everyone often forgets about is to do it to Bing's webmaster tools as well might only be 10% of search but I think we would all like to raise like 10% remove the test links if you're developing your site on WP engine or pressable or any one of these website posts they're going to give you a test link bad developers leave the test links still there just change the main URL of the site this tool here at WP3.org is going to allow you to test all the links on your site and if you're seeing one of the old let's say page link links you can then go back behind and then check to see which one you have to remove sometimes just by changing the base URL in the settings on general settings has not been to change all the file links for all the images on the site especially if they were developing a custom site for you so this will test that tip 17 and for accelerating mobile pages will help accelerate your mobile pages so really nice tool make sure your pages are super fast the other thing that's going to be really helpful with really dark and rainy all of a sudden the other thing that's going to be helpful for is if you are in a place or if you are marketing to a population that doesn't have unlimited data plans that AMP logo is a weekend for them so they know that they can click on that link and it's not going to use all their data on their phone in India the AMP project is hugely important if you're working towards either if you work for a non-profit or an organization where they just don't have the luxury of having unlimited internet this AMP installation is really going to help you get faster and faster and faster so one issue is it doesn't really fit on the WordPress ecosystem but that's a whole different conversation curating the client experience so this is some of the nice things that I like to add when we're launching sites if you have user manuals there's something nice about handing your client a 90 page manual on how WordPress works you print it out you hand it to them I even find it it's out of date in six weeks as we know but there's something super nice about it video user manuals also has about 80 different videos that you can show the client so when they forget how to add an image or they forget how to add a new page they can rely on the video user manual for that and it's updated with each new point of view tip 19 especially if it's a custom WordPress site that you can build on the theme feel a little bit this is often overlooked people miss that 404 page very frequently and it's a great way to sort of capture and send them in the right direction so giving them a search tool saying here's your way back to home here's some different options for people to have done before and you can find out all the people that are heading into your 404 page where? Google search console is going to give you all your 404 errors style your pages consistently so one of the big separators between what is a custom between what is a professional website what is an amateur site is style so if you're using multiple fonts and colors that you wouldn't paint your house those kind of things create sort of an amateur look so you want to avoid that thing so when you're creating these custom sites to limit the number of fonts in the CSS that are there remove the development plugins so often times when you're moving the site from the development server to the live server and you're using plugins typically to move that plugin from your development to production well once the site is launched that plugin is not needed anymore but also often developers will leave that transfer plugin in there forever and a day and it's just not needed anymore and it's actually producing a vulnerability on that site now so uninstall those development plugins when you're going live especially if the client is never going to use it again tip 22 this is my favorite one to have it all the time so we'll go back to the doggie daycare the designer the designer will get the project they'll do wireframes info at JacksonvilleDoggieDaycare.com they'll set it up they'll figure it out the wireframes will be done the design will get done the client loves it, it's approved the developer gets it, they build it the site goes up three weeks later the client says you're not getting leads or any inquiries from the website and then you realize info at JacksonvilleDoggieDaycare never existed but you got so nose blind to it it's like the Febreze commercial no one noticed that that email address doesn't exist all too often they'll send it off and it'll immediately bounce back so as part of web developers just to send an email to it to say hey does this email even exist because often times it will go to a box if no one is even checking test the forms so again same with the email use all the forms on the site to submit them those forms could be a contact form the form could be the email newsletter form, it could be an e-commerce order form all the forms on the site should be tested the second piece is this is to set yourself a reminder every month to test those forms because just as they worked on February 1st does not mean they're going to work on March 1st as we know we're pushing out all these plugin updates all the time it's very possible that that doesn't work the second piece to this the third piece after you do the counter reminders the third piece is that your web post typically has unauthenticated unauthenticated email so you want to use some sort of SMTP delivery service like a mandrill or sender to make sure that email is hopping off pressable or WP Engine or paging and actually getting delivered to their inbox so testing these forms is a key and crucial piece and it needs to be done monthly because you could be losing business by virtue of not receiving those emails 2.4 success pages how many of you have ever received an email a form submission 5, 6, 7 times I have and it's because they haven't the person submitting the form didn't get that gratification that they filled in the form properly the second piece of what the success form does is you can set up tracking your Google Analytics to fire an event when that page loads so if you are running a digital marketing firm and you want to know how many leads you got over the course of the month or how many orders you can set a tracking pixel on this page that will then create an event that you can use to monitor the number of leads you got without having to go through your email and say oh I got 6 leads this month check for Grammins and Orphans all too often we'll be copying content out of a source that doesn't initially play well with WordPress one of those sources is Microsoft Word so all too often we'll add an ampersand or a quotation mark or a parentheses of some sort and it will create a Gremlin in the title text and meta text just to run through those on the site before the site goes live to make sure that none of those things happen the other things the page breaks inside of Microsoft Word are typically different so you'll see these Orphans of lines that will drop you just have to go through all the content to make sure that none of those line breaks carry through Hello World there's nothing that separates an amateur site from a professional one when you go to their blog and see the original Hello World post there if we're looking at the content this needs to be real real it's fine for your formatting it's fine for your style sheet but when the site goes up and sees Hello World it's not a professional business security those are the email addresses that we mentioned earlier should be obfuscated so that a bot or a spider can index 28 28 break backups most of the web posts that you're going to be using are going to have their own backups but if you're old school like me I like to have another backup somewhere else trust, verify I like to have one copy of the website in my own files and when I build a website for someone I'll typically take the website and burn it to a jump drive and mail it to them when they get that jump drive in the mail they'll put it next to their most sacred possessions they'll put it next to their tax return they'll put it in a safe deposit box because it's something that they've done so much investing into their website and this is their critical backup as we all know you're up to the inside all the time with new content and your posts so those of us in the room know that it's going to be out of date but at least it's a starting point to go back in case there's something terrible that happens it's a 29 using a managed web post and even if you are most of the managed web posts only take care of core so to have some sort of software that's taken care of additional plugins that have been installed we use managed WP and make sure that all the plugins are updated can I ask a question we've got one more slide okay and tip 30 to make sure that your site has an SSL certificate on it there's a bunch of different vendors for this some of them are free I've listed two of the free ones up there because I'm cheap but those are some of the big options that are there and come July if you're using Chrome it's going to say that that website is not secure so if your website is not served by HDBS in July everyone's going to see it not secure on your site so between now and then if you don't already have one install it to make sure that it's installed so if you weren't able to keep up with me you can go to southernweb.com for each other's WP Jacks and download these slides with all the links but we can ask a question stand so wow when you're doing a plugin updates for clients how do you handle if it breaks who be obviously you can revert back but at what point does it become the client's cost versus the client's um yeah so if it moists in our dealer case there's not a warranty that says that that plugin is good and sometimes it's used let's say it goes broke and you had to release it on when that's a fairly simple transfer and it's not something I'm too concerned about it just comes to its end of its life and the client needs to update it you know you have to have a conversation with the client and explain that not only is it the end of life and that's just really a conversation with the client in our field case where we host all of our client sites if they're not willing to re-invest I have to move them off of my manager's environment so it's more like you've got to re-invest back but on our side I make sure that I have a developer doing all the updates so that if it does white screen someone's there to get it back on you got a question okay, yes ma'am I actually have several questions so if I get in the way I know somebody stopped my first question is of all of these 30 things how many of them are going to cost me money to do um I just can't put anything in where it's going to cost you money I can't think did anyone say any one that was going to in SSL potentially that there's a lot of free options for that too I specifically give this so that the things that are that are free the only thing that doesn't freeze your time yeah just doing these 30 things is going to take you a week and a half right if you do something we're going to add to that real quick I've been really good at hosting and because Google making the new release that speed is so important you need to pay for the best of the huge amount exactly and there's some great people in here they're hosting company in here I don't want to say one over the other I mean we all have different preferences so if you ask each one of us we'll say something different we'll probably debate it but that's a clause that you should put in every month to your site and not go cheap on that share it as bad yeah there's like a condo to some of the white things sorry that's a good analogy you said about deleting I love the term flipping pages that was great can we turn on the lights again you said at one point you have to go back and delete the old plugins wow and remove the development plugins I know you just figure out the old plugins because they pop up on your management thing but what do you consider development plugins that should be deleted before you if you had a developer that did a site transfer between your old host and your new host and you're not moving that site anymore once you've removed it, you don't need to have it installed so that's the only thing that would be something to delete if you have deactivated plugins in there that are just hanging around for everything those don't need to be there velvet blues velvet blues is something to cover your URLs when you go live and a lot of people don't use Jetpack and a lot of the other ones there I mean Jetpack is a big element if your client isn't using it if you're moving off it's a Swiss Army night you can take that thing off we'll run a little bit faster I'll say that around that is he here? he was in Miami and I have one other question when you talked about the title and meta tags I know what those are but you sort of lost me when you started talking about the tiers 1, 2 and 3 so the first tier is the default way that WordPress handles it it's just going to be the page title whatever you put in the title field that's one tier 2 is you install a plugin and then it just copies everything over you put the same title tag and meta tag on every single page it's kind of lazy but at least it's a checkbox like you did it step up from there would be to do a little bit of research about what people are searching for and then come up with unique title tags and meta tags for each one of the pages of your site thank you on site 30 you have the words force SSL and I have a SSL but on site ground if I go to my c-panel I will see a little box it's a place for a check and it says force SSL and then I'll give you a warning that if you check that bad things can happen so I have an SSL it's working the box is not checked I'm afraid to check because of the warning so I don't really understand what it means when they say force SSL I'm assuming so I don't know fully but the hint that you gave was there I have an SSL and it sounds like it's not there no it's there it's working I get the HTTP it's all green so you bought the SSL through someone else it's through site ground but the box says force it my question really is about the word force because they are implying or saying that that's going to do something beyond just having it so I really don't know what forcing it means I guess it's my real question I think he's talking about forcing redirect so be forcing the non-encrypted version to the secure version the time when that might be an issue is let's say you put a widget on the site that was unsecured and you're still serving it and then it's throwing an error in some browsers that I think is what the error that the warning is about to make sure that all the content is encrypted and if you happen to be pulling images from another website that could cause a problem too we have that third party stuff whether it be the weather widget or the images or you iframe the site that was unsecure that's probably what the warning is about you mentioned each of the developers has their own login you pull all those logins before it goes on if you're not involved in the site anymore if that site launches the end of your relationship so we would typically pull everything we want and then we need to go back only because half the time you have no idea is that employee still there or is it pure weather you felt there was good practice to pull and everything I would believe one I would believe one but if you have multiple ones and I would make sure that you get a list when you're working with a client of everyone that's going to be administrating the website and it's all too easy to get one user name and then just hand it out and post it to the wall or that notebook that some people have in their office that has all the passwords so here's the kind of thing that I like talking about this at work so if you're selling WordPress and they're at the Drupal school or a GMS school the first thing they're going to bring out is security WordPress is not secure and then you see Brenda at the side desk over there has a notebook with all the passwords in it right? that she's had the same passwords there so if you're looking at a community in terms of making sure the sites are unhackable the notepad in the corner creates a vulnerability in our community so make sure that everyone Brenda with the notepad should not have admin access to the website right? your name isn't Brenda, is it? yeah I'm the one with the notepad can you talk to number 27 I didn't follow you there alright so if an email address Brenda at xyzcompany.com is sitting out there in normal mail to fashion it's like a beacon to the bots and to the spiders to grab that and then start sending via Graspam I mean it's so you can just Google encrypt email address and it will give you the JavaScript that you can plop on the page and send it to the bots going back to the moving plugins moving reactivate I would I would remember each deactivated plugin is still sitting out there it's still sitting in the content folder so if you can remove that vulnerability especially if you're done if you're done done and it's been two or three days you're not going to have to push a new release out there what about templates if you start very often if you start a new website it comes with like five different templates in the background and I heard you should leave at least once because the one you build breaks at least you have something else to show it on yeah that would be a sad website but yeah I would rather see you add backups in place for the website than trying to rely on the theme that isn't the proper theme I'd rather see oh I can do it once like backup then let me find the theme and kind of wing it for a little bit so I'd rather bring back the site that wasn't corrupted yes as a client how is this check going to help do I just hand it to my developer and say do this before they get started yeah you could do that um I mean essentially you're giving an order of what needs to be done most of these things with the exception of the CSS or the JS most of the things that you can do email addresses you can encrypt just in the content block WordPress you can click the force SSL button on the website most everything in this list is not saying you can do it I'm not trying to create a this is not the developer track I'm not creating a version controlled environment where you've got to learn preprocessing script now that's not what this checklist is about so if you go through a lot of these are already going to be there you just click and unclick once you get into WordPress most of the things are going to be here there's maybe three things you won't be able to do I'm thinking back the CSS editing and that's about it I can think of a lot of stuff most of the stuff you'll be able to take advantage of yourself and for free yes I'm launching a project this weekend so I've got an old domain I'm putting on a new domain how do I redirect specific pages of the old domain I know I can do the top level domain the new domain but how would I redirect those old pages so everything you're changing everything on the annotate from old to the new then you would do the whole thing so I can only do the top level domain why would you not want to well I want to get those specific pages I can get all the contacts does that make sense the page pages the page pages have it set up the top page the whole thing is changing you can get a whole new name you can just set it to the base URL unless the page is set as five pages if you get a whole bunch more than five pages then I can get to do the base URL so I suggest more if you had a site launch where you're moving from one page structure to a different one but if you're moving the whole enterprise from one domain to a different one so there's a setting for your current URL and you can check it and tell Google to do the whole thing that is a revamp basically of your site and that's new there's a new feature for that thank you for that people are done on time? well good