Things to Check Before, During, and After Launching a WordPress Website

Launching a WordPress Website is not as straightforward as you may think to launch a website. The sheer number of seemingly minor tasks that can be easily missed is overwhelming – from consistent typography, spelling, layout, call-to-action to 404 error pages, content, SSL certificates, and so on…

I’ll walk you through the steps you need to take before you launch your site (both before and after building it). This will make sure everything is running smoothly, giving an enjoyable browsing experience.

Launching a WordPress Website: What to Check Before You Begin Building Your Website

There are a few things to think over before you begin developing your website or hiring a web designer.

1. Analyze the current state of your website and collect data by crawling your current site

If you’re planning a website redesign, you can evaluate your current site and find its flaws. Consider what you haven’t accomplished on your existing website.

You might discover that your site is outdated, does not work well in terms of ease of use, or has an ineffective SEO layout.  Make sure to define all problems with the current website clearly. You’ll have a better idea of what kind of targets you want to set for your new website once you do this.

In just about any website development strategy, documenting the layout of your site is a must. If you have a small or large website, manually checking each page can be time-consuming and labour-intensive.

Take into account using a website crawling tool to understand better your site’s current pages, properties, and overall structure. When making improvements to the site layout, this would significantly reduce the chance of ending up with duplicate pages or missing a redirect.

2. Find a CMS that’s right for you (Choose WordPress)

If this is your first website, you’ll want to choose the right content management system because it will make the process of launching and maintaining your site much more manageable.

Thankfully, this is a simple choice: go with WordPress.

It’s not only the most shared content management system; it’s also the most versatile, flexible, and trusted by companies like CNN, TechCrunch, Bloomberg, and others.

3. Create a strong SEO strategy before launching a WordPress website

You’ll need to build a strong SEO strategy if you want to boost your website’s efficiency and quantity of search engine traffic. This means that your website should be optimized to appear more prominently in search engines and receive more “organic traffic,” or traffic that you aren’t paying for…

Keyword analysis, developing a content plan around those keywords, and addressing the website design are all part of a solid SEO strategy you need to adopt before launching a WordPress Website. If you already have a website and want to create a new one, creating an SEO strategy entails finding out how to modify existing pages and removing the ones that aren’t needed.

Launching a WordPress Website: What to Look at After the Site is complete?

After you’ve finished building a (new) website, double-check that all is in order and running correctly before going online and launching a WordPress Website. Let’s go through a few things you should keep in mind during this pre-launch time to check your WordPress website accessibility.

4. Make Sure the Content Is Free Of Errors

Reviewing all material on the site, namely page content and premium content is one of the most important tasks you can do before the launch.

Nothing is more frustrating than a mistake on a critical list. If you don’t want to come off as unprofessional, proofread every piece of text. All errors in spelling, grammar, and factual facts should be corrected. Grammarly, for example, is an online platform that will help you with this.

5. Examine the images, audio, and video files on your website

Look for any problems that might be present with your website’s audio or video files. Both audio and video files must function correctly.

Images should be appropriately optimized and numbered. Make sure that all of your photos have alt tags. Alt text helps understand images by people with visual impairments, and it also aids in search engine optimization.

When website designers don’t have the right picture, they can use placeholder images when designing a page. Ensure that you replace all such images with the appropriate images and designs.

6. Use the same content and title formatting for all pages

This is a very important point in your WordPress website checklist. The professional appearance of your site will be enhanced if you have consistency across the board. This is why it’s a good idea to keep all titles and headings in the same style. To help you format your titles in the same way, use sites like Woorkup’s Capitalize & Convert Case tool.

7. Examine the readability of the content

Your content should be simple to read. Sentences should be brief for text to be readable. Bullet points can be included to aid this. A lot of white space should be present. Furthermore, the font used should be suitable and consistent.

 Separate the material into various sections of text wherever possible. Be sure to use subheadings to boost the readability of your site’s content as well as your SEO. To make it simpler for our team, we use Rank Math, a WordPress SEO plugin. Click here for more information on Rank Math.

8. Create a Contact Page

If a website doesn’t have contact details, about half of visitors will abandon it. With this in mind, a contact page is essential if you want your website to appear professional, trustworthy, and appealing to tourists.

9. Ensure a Responsive Design for Your Website

A responsive design means that the website is usable and looks nice on all platforms. When you know that mobile devices account for more than half of all internet traffic, making sure your website is mobile-friendly is necessary.

In practice, this means that the content on both the mobile and desktop versions should be similar, the text should be easy to read on both, and navigation should be quick.

10. Make sure your browser is compatible.

If your website looks great in your current browser, it doesn’t mean that it carries over in other browsers. This is why you should test your site’s compatibility with various browsers, especially the most common ones like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.

You can monitor browser compatibility on your own by visiting your website in various browsers. Alternatively, there are multiple resources available to assist you. One of them is BrowserShots, open-source web software that allows several computers in various locations to access your site in their browser. After that, the software takes screenshots of your site from each device, uploading them to a central server for you to check.

11. Double-check the plugin compatibility

Since you might be using a large number of third-party plugins to build your site, likely, some of them won’t be compatible, resulting in incompatibility problems.

Due to compatibility problems, some features might not function correctly or at all. In certain situations, such issues can also cause your site to crash. Furthermore, compatibility problems aren’t limited to plugins. They can occur between a plugin and theme you’re using or even between a plugin and the version of WordPress you’re using.

Fortunately, there are several Solutions free plugins available that will help you test the compatibility of your plugins before going online. PHP Compatibility Checker is an example of such a plugin for WordPress.

12. Make a 404 Error Page

It’s best to make your own 404 page. This page would lower the chance of losing visitors and increase the overall user experience. Furthermore, a good 404 page keeps visitors to your site and encourages them to hang around to see what else is going on.

13. Analyze URLs

Launching a WordPress Website is not always straight forward. This can easily result in broken internal and external links, which is why it’s a good idea to double-check the URLs on the live edition.

Broken link Checker and Xenu’s Link Sleuth are two tools that can be useful when it comes to inspecting broken links.

14. Examine the Conversion Paths

This includes double-checking the landing and thank-you pages for functionality. You might, for example, test the web forms to see whether messages are successfully submitted or sent.

Conversion paths must also be tested to ensure that CTA (call-to-action) buttons are present in the appropriate locations. A call-to-action is any feature on your website that invites visitors to take action. CTAs are the primary means of communicating to your visitors what you want them to do.

Conversion rates improve when the “call to actions” is explicit and guides users to take a particular action. As a result, before launching your platform, you must ensure that your CTAs function correctly and is placed in appropriate locations.

15. Install an SEO plugin for WordPress

You will want your website to be visible to a potential visitor.  To help you achieve this, you can customize it for search engines or make it more Google-friendly.

To do so, make sure that all of your website’s pages have unique page names and meta descriptions. It is best to optimize all pages that intend to rank organically around single or multiple keywords.

16. Verify that your social sharing links lead to the correct accounts.

Before Launching a WordPress Website, make sure your social icons work. Ascertain that these icons lead to the appropriate pages, that the requisite buttons are present, and visitors can share them.

The essential items to verify here are that the social media share icons link to the correct accounts and work across various browsers (depending on which ones you aim to support).

17. Create a website with terms and conditions

The terms and conditions page can seem unimportant and easy to miss, but depending on how you set up your website, you may be legally required to have one.

If you run an e-commerce store or a company website, this is particularly true. The inclusion of these pages is also considered by some to be one of the many confidence signals that Google considers when reviewing websites.

18. Resolve any navigational problems

It’s essential to have a straightforward navigation structure before launching a WordPress Website. You don’t want users to get confused and not know which button to press. Make sure your navigation is easy and user-friendly if you don’t want to lose guests.

19. Introduce a dependable backup solution

Launching a WordPress Website is good, but many items can take the entire website offline, from hackers to a basic coding mistake. You deserve to have peace of mind, which is why you should always have a secure WordPress website backup solution in place so that you can quickly restore your site if anything goes wrong.

20. Make sure your WordPress site is safe

Take website security seriously from the start. Protecting your website means reducing the chance of DDoS attacks or malware.

There are several ways to improve the protection of your website.

You might, for example, set a limit on how many login attempts users can make in a given time. This eliminates the possibility of brute force attacks, which are attacks in which a hacker tries to guess the username and password repeatedly before they find the right combination.

You might also consider adding IP addresses to a whitelist. In layman’s terms, this means that your dashboard can only be reached from those IP addresses. Whitelisting is a safe way to defend yourself because IP addresses are unique and not possible to duplicate.

21. Avoid spam

The more traffic your website receives, the more spam it can get. This is why it’s a good idea to install anti-spam apps.

An anti-spam solution not only makes handling comments simpler but also increases the protection of your website.

Launching a WordPress Website: What To Check Post-Launch

22. Re-evaluate the User Experience

It’s a good idea to test your site now that it’s live to see if you get the same results as you did before it went live.

So keep an eye out for any possible browser compatibility problems and make sure the design is sensitive across various devices and browsers.

Your WordPress website speed is also a very important aspect of your visitors User Experience, so make sure your website is fast enough to avoid loosing visitors.

23. Check to See if Conversion Paths Work

Take some time to see if the conversion paths’ functionality is as good as before the launch. Re-test the call-to-action buttons and make sure the data is being submitted correctly via the online forms.

24. Examine your security and backup plans

Now is the time to double-check that your backup plan is working correctly. Check the website regularly for copies. Create a schedule for upgrading plugins if you used them.

25. Put your Analytics Setup to the Test

Once you’ve launched your website, you’ll probably want to know who uses it, what browsers they use, and other user-related details. This type of data is essential if you’re going to keep improving your website and tailoring the content to your target audience.

You may want to consider building a Google Analytics account to accomplish this. This is a Google web analytics service rated as the most popular web analytics service. You can also choose from a variety of Google Analytics alternatives.

Final Thoughts

It can appear that launching a new website is a challenging job. However, if you follow the steps outlined in this detailed guide, you can discover that the procedure isn’t nearly as terrifying as it appears.

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I hope this WordPress tutorial helped you learn the Things to Check Before, During, and After Launching a WordPress Website or Blog. And for more WordPress, free step-by-step tutorials visit our dedicated WordPress tips section (You can find more tutorials like How To Fix The WordPress White Screen Of Death) and check our Best WordPress hosting providers guide if you are still looking for a host to start your blog.