The ultimate checklist for your website’s pre-launch: Six essentials
Before publishing your brand-new website, check that everything is in working order, from design to functionality. Go live after following this checklist for the pre-launch.
You may be eager to see a website go live after investing time and effort in its development; however, you should not press “publish” without first reviewing everything.
To avoid costly fixes in the future, you owe it to yourself to check and double-check your website.
Have no idea where to begin? We’ve put together a six-part website launch checklist to help developers like you make sure they have everything they need to publish a stunning website.
Twofold really looking at plan
It’s very much barely noticeable (or break) something during plan emphasess and input meetings with clients. Here is a plan agenda to guarantee all that’s all together prior to sending off:
Spacing: Is the site’s spacing consistent? Does each component have sufficient breathing room?
Colors: Is there a color scheme that is consistent and harmonious? Are your brand colors well-defined? Have global swatches been used?
Shadows: If drop shadows were used, does each one have the same light source? Do they have a similar haze, obscurity, and spread values?
Typography: Is the font stack consistent and logical? Is it clear why italic or bold fonts are used? Are heading sizes standardized? Is the web safe and can all text be read?
Imagery: Do any of the images appear pixelated or blurry? Are any pictures broken or a definitely unique record size? Do all non-improving pictures have alt-text?
Logo: Although it is only an image, its significance is such that it merits its own step. Is the site always using the most recent and up-to-date version? Does it appear sharp and clear, without being pixelated or blurry?
Cross-browser appearance
Following those initial visual checks, it’s time to make sure the site looks the same and works on all devices.
To ensure compatibility, you must test your website across as many variables as possible because different browsers render web designs differently. Google Chrome, Firefox, and Safari are the most widely used browsers, but Opera and Microsoft Edge are also available. You run the risk of alienating potential customers whose preferred browser prevents the site from functioning properly if you only target one or two browsers.
Remember: No matter where it is displayed, your website’s appearance and functionality should be the same. This means making certain that the layout, typography, navigation, and content of your website should work well across a variety of devices, browsers, and screen sizes.
Cross-device appearance
There are now more web-capable devices than ever before, which means that there is a staggering variety of screen sizes. Your website should work well on any screen if it is done right, but make sure that a responsive design keeps cross-device navigation working well.
The way people interact with your website is determined by navigation, a crucial aspect of web design. It is easier for visitors to use the website and easier for them to find what they are looking for if it has a design that is pleasing to the eye and easy to use. Eventually, clients ought to go from Point A to Point B consistently — that is the characteristic of extraordinary route.
When you’re cheerful while exploring the site on the improvement stage, give it a last test on a PC, cell phone, and tablet and confirm nothing is lost in interpretation.
Picture improvement
Pictures and illustrations upgrade client experience, further develop Website optimization, and influence a webpage’s stacking times.
Since mobile devices now have displays with high refresh rates and ultra-high definition, high-quality graphics are essential. Images with grain appear unprofessional.
Upload images twice as big as they are on your website. You can resize and compress images for lower-resolution devices while maintaining larger files for high-resolution devices if your website is equipped with image optimization. This ensures support for slower devices and internet speeds in addition to high-quality imagery.
Read our article on site performance and our responsive images to learn more about the effects of image optimization.
Testing the functionality of your website
It is essential to strike a balance between design and usability in order to ensure that your website looks and works as you intended. If you don’t, you run the risk of having an unprofessional-looking website or an attractive website that doesn’t work well. Users will not be satisfied with either choice.
Usefulness testing as a rule includes two perspectives: testing of the link and integration
Incorporation testing
Site incorporation is the point at which your webpage imparts data to another application, framework, or site. Integration testing looks at all of your website’s individual integrations together to make sure they all work. The number of integrations you have will determine how long this testing takes.
Link testing can be time-consuming due to the average number of links on a web page. For instance, an e-commerce website needs links to all product pages, navigation, and calls to action (CTAs). It’s not unexpected to find a connection or two that goes no place, yet it’s crucial for view these as before clients do, as broken interfaces adversely influence both Website design enhancement and client experience.
Editing content
Good content keeps visitors interested and encourages sales. If content is useful, visitors are also more likely to share it.
In most cases, content testing entails going through all of the website’s content to make sure it is accurate, free of typos, and current. Be thorough; you don’t want a lorem ipsum paragraph or an incorrect spelling of your brand name in a section of your website. Errors in spelling and grammar lower the value of content, so if you’re not good at editing, hire a professional.
It’s entirely fine to change content after the site goes live. Even after a website has been published, a content management system like Webflow allows you or the client to continuously modify the text and images. The first batch of content undergoes content testing to guarantee a professional presentation of the website and brand.
SEO evaluation is the process of improving the quality and quantity of search engine traffic to a website. Your website’s visibility increases when it appears higher on the result pages, which can result in more visits and sales.
Fortunately, you can optimize your website for search engines by making a few changes.
Semantic structure in place Web crawlers read through a website on behalf of a search engine to comprehend its content. They enable search engines to determine when a website should be displayed as a relevant search result. You need to use languages that these programs can understand, like HTML, Javascript, or CSS, to help them crawl your site.
Semantic coding language is the sentence structure that makes increase dialects like HTML more clear by better characterizing explicit components of a page. Semantic tags aid web crawlers in comprehending your site’s various components and their functions.
Meta SEO tags
In addition to on-page structure, titling and describing a website’s pages can assist web crawlers in comprehending it.
Meta depiction
The meta depiction is a short passage that portrays what a site’s page brings to the table in more detail than the title. Unless the search engine selects a portion of the page it considers to be more pertinent, it appears below the meta title on a SERP. To provide searchers with a more precise summary of the website, Google rewrites 70% of meta descriptions.
Settings for the Open Graph Social media is an important part of SEO. Provide sufficient Open Graph (OG) information to maximize its benefits and make your website appealing when shared on social media.
When a website’s URL appears in comments or posts on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, OG technology transforms the URL into a page preview. When you paste a link to a news article into a draft post on Facebook, you might have noticed that the platform turns the link into a box with the article’s image, title, and preview. This is old technology at work.
Preparing for analytics Before launching your website, connect it to an analytics tool because website analytics are essential for comprehending performance data. A Google Analytics account can be set up for free. From the moment your website goes live, you can use this account to keep track of visitors and user engagement.
SEO is inextricably linked to web performance and analytics. Websites that provide a seamless user experience are frequently rewarded by Google.
Testing the website After reviewing the design, functionality, content, and SEO aspects of the website, move on to the final step: conducting site tests. We recommend three phases of testing: during, before, and after Testing in waves makes it simpler to identify errors and their times. Additionally, it keeps testing organized.