It’s important that you complete this checklist before your site says hello to the world! A website launch can quickly become a nightmare if you don’t have a process and plan to follow. To avoid an SEO disaster, you need a well-defined plan for every stage of the GO LIVE process. Note: This checklist contains items that should be applied to your site on its your staging server or test environment. Source: http://www.techwyse.com/blog/internet-marketing/best-practices-for-launching-new-a-website/

1. Ultimate
Source: Best Practices For Launching a New Website
Website Launch Checklist

2. I have over three years of Internet Marketing experience. I prefer to focus on
Analytics, CRO, SMM, Local SEO and Link Earning.
Search has become more localized and personalized over time and this is
exciting to me. Companies who are able to capitalize on these changes will
eventually emerge on top.
“
“

3. You’ve worked months for this, maybe even years.
Launch day is fast approaching, but
it’s easy to forget a fewbe careful,
critical items when your finger is itching to hit to
“Go”button.

4. It’s important that you complete this
CHECKLISTbefore your site says to the world!

5. To avoid an SEO disaster, you need a
well-defined plan
for every stage of the process.GO LIVE

6. Website is an extension of
your BRAND and your BUSINESS

7. Hopefully this checklist will
have you well on your way to a
successful launch!

8. 1. URL Redirection

9. Make sure you advise
your programmer to do
PERMANENT
301 redirect

10. CHECK
Make sure that you
the server response code

11. 2. RUN XENU

12. You can see some really useful data:
Tip: When you see any broken link in Xenu i.e. with status as “not found”, right click on
that link and select URL properties. You will be able to see all those pages from where
the broken url is linked.
• Status code of all pages
• Type of page crawled
• All external links
• Title tag and meta description

13. 3.CHECK YOUR SITE FOR
DUMMY CONTENT

14. LOREM IPSUM SCANNER DUMMY TEXT CHECKER
This tool will scan your
website for popular
placeholder text such as:
“Lorem ipsum, sunt in culpa, coming
soon, under construction, asdf, qwert,
etaoin shrdlu, now is the time for all
good men, the quick brown fox, test
image, test description, for placement
only”

15. 4. SUBMIT XML SITEMAP

16. Once the site is live, you need
to create a xml sitemap
which contains all URLs of
your site.
Tips: Before submitting sitemap, you can use “Fetch as Google” option in Google
Webmaster Tools and you can confirm whether Google bot can access your site.

17. 5. TEST AND OPTIMIZE
YOUR SITE SPEED

18. Website speed is a factor which affects
user experience and also a factor for ranking
in Google.
Tip: If you are bit more techie, you can install PageSpeed module on Apache or Nginx in
your server. This will help you decrease your website load speed.
You can use
Google Page Speed Insights Tool
for checking the site load speed.

19. 6.ENSURE TRACKING
CODES ARE WORKING

20. • Google Analytics Code
• Google Adwords Conversion Code
• Google Remarketing Code
• Other codes which were implemented in the old site
Tip: Google provides a free tool called Tag Assistant which can help you to detect various
Google related tags.

21. 7. SECURITY & LAW

22. • Ensure to use strong Username/Password
• Install security plugin to avoid DB injects, hacking, etc.
• Ensure CMS, plugins, modules are the latest version
• Ensure site complies with regional anti-spam laws
• Limit the number of time someone can attempt to log in
• Monitor for malware
• Ensure regular automatic backups

23. 8. GENERAL

24. • The contact address, phone numbers on the site are correct.
• captchas are functioning properly.
• Favicon is added.
• Ensure social media icons link to the right page.
• Cross browser checks.
• Validating site using W3C validator

25. • No duplicate content by using CopyScape
• Check how your site look in different screen sizes. Use Screenfly
to test this
• Ensure that the site is not blocked with robots.txt
• If your site is WordPress, ensure to uncheck “Discourage search
engines from indexing this site”

26. If you correctly follow tips mentioned
in this blog, you’ll avoid major issues
which could result in complete loss of
visits/conversions, i.e. your worst
case scenario when launching a new
site!