Going live with a website? Is it a WordPress website or static site? Did you check yourself?
- Manual QA – Check all links, pages and make sure everything is working.
- Links – Are addresses linked to a Google Directions link? Are the email addresses on all pages using “mailto”. Are telephone numbers using <a href=”tel:+18007777777″>+1 800 777 7777</a>.
- Responsiveness – did you check the website in Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari & Firefox? And on a phone, iPad, Tablet, & Android phone?
- Use Neil Patel’s SEO Analyzer: https://neilpatel.com/seo-analyzer/
- Test Page Speed: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
- ADA Compliance for people with disabilities: https://www.webaccessibility.com
- Setup Google Analytics
- Setup HotJar – This tool helps you see what users are doing on your website
- Mail Relay – Are you sending emails from your website (i.e. Contact us forms, WooCommerce etc) then I highly suggest using a mail relay to an authorized mail sending server or your own email account. If you are using WordPress you can use WP Mail SMTP plugin. You can set it to use your own Gmail / Hotmail / Yahoo / AWS / SendGrid etc account
- Backup Backup Backup – did you set a backup strategy? I would highly recommend at the minimum you take at least 1 incremental backup per day, if you are running an e-commerce website I would say take an incremental backup every 15 min. Take a full backup weekly and keep at least 10-30 days of backups.
- Security Plugin for WordPress – Did you install some type of security plugin? Succuri, Wordfence, Limit logins etc Restoring sites after being hacked sucks.
- SSL / HTTPS – Did you make sure you are using HTTPS? You will need to either purchase an SSL certificate or use LetsEncrypt. Plesk can easily use LetsEncrypt but for an e-commerce website I would highly recommend using a paid SSL Certificate to get the green lock in address bar.
- Payment Settings – If you are going live with an e-commerce website did you make sure you set the correct payments, sales tax, & shipping information. Did you do a test purchase? Did you do a live test purchase?
- DNS Change – Do you have the passwords needed to make the domain DNS changes? (i.e. – Godaddy Credentials)
- Monitoring Check – Continued checks to make sure your website is up. You can use services like: UptimeRobot or Install Nagios if you are brave =)
- Repeat Weekly – I would rinse and repeat these steps weekly to make sure the site is well maintained. It ain’t easy. But remember with great power comes great responsibility.
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