Launching your site – we have the ultimate pre-launch checklist
Launching a new website involves far more than just pushing the button once it’s coded. Over all our years designing and coding sites here at 21Digital, we’ve developed our very own 50 point pre-launch checklist, which we use to put every one of our new client websites through its paces before we finally put it live. We won’t go into the full 50 points here, but we thought we’d take a second to highlight four of the most important…
Migrate metadata to maintain your SEO rankings
It’s no good having a shiny brand new website if you lose all your hard-earned SEO rankings in the process. That’s why a good number of the checks on our list are focused on technical SEO – the behind-the-scenes stuff all geared towards making sure you stay at the top of Google search results, ensuring a steady stream of traffic to your site.
The migration of your metadata is a prime example of these sorts of technical SEO checks. Basically, metadata is the term used to refer to the technical details embedded in the HTML of every webpage. These aren’t displayed on the webpage itself, but are read by web crawlers and search engines like Google, which uses the information to determine where to rank the page in its search results. By migrating the metadata from your old site over to your new one, we’ll keep your Google rankings intact, driving the maximum amount of traffic to your new site.
Plan and implement 301 redirects
Speaking of preserving your web traffic, a 301 redirection plan is an absolutely essential step to putting a new site live, but for some reason we’ve heard it can often be overlooked. If you’re not fully familiar with what that involves, basically a 301 intercepts your website visitors if they land on an old, dead webpage, and redirects them to the new live page instead.
This ensures anyone who’s ever bookmarked your site – or followed an old link from elsewhere on the web – won’t be greeted by a dreaded 404 page. Let’s be honest, when faced with one of these, the vast majority of your customers will simply ‘bounce’ – in other words, go elsewhere. That means you’d be losing traffic, and that’s exactly why we’re always so careful to conduct exhaustive 301 redirect plans on every site we launch.
Proofread your site for spelling and grammar
It’s not just the technical things we check for – before your site goes live, we’ll also take care to give your content a detailed examination too. The words on your site do a lot of heavy lifting for your brand, and they’re a big part of the first impression you’ll make on your customers. One misspelled word, or any placeholder ‘dummy’ text (lorem ipsum) can have a big impact on your credibility, as it can be interpreted as a lack of attention to detail. There’s no upside to that, whatever industry you’re in!
To avoid that scenario, our copywriters will cast their eagle eyes over your content, checking over both spelling and grammar, and we’ll replace any placeholder images too – so that ultimately, you can be sure your site’s communicating with your customers in exactly the way you want it to.
Ensure your Privacy Policy and cookies are in place
Compliance is something we’re also particularly scrupulous about when it comes to your site, and it’s a critical item on our pre-flight checklist. We’ll ensure that your site meets all the key criteria required by law, including the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR for short. That means, for example, checking that you’ve got an appropriate Privacy Policy in place, and that the site gives users all the appropriate information about (and control over) your targeting cookies, including the ability to provide or withdraw their consent at any time.
(Now, it’s important to say that we’re not lawyers here at 21Digital, so we’re not able to provide you with any legal advice with regards to your Privacy Policy, or write it on your behalf. If you need any specific legal assistance, instead we can put you in touch with our own commercial solicitors, Farleys Solicitors LLP.)
Our brand new sites for Butchers Equipment Warehouse and Innovator International are both amongst the latest to have gone through our extensive 50-point pre-flight checklist – you can read more about them in the links above, or take a look through more of our projects over in the Our Work section.
Or if you’re ready to take the next step with a brand new site for your own business, feel free to get in touch by giving us a call on 01254 660 650, or dropping us an email on hello@21digital.agency.
