You’ve been working on your project for months. After countless hours of designing, coding, editing, staging, testing and re-testing, you’re just about ready to push it live. Congratulations! You’re almost at the finish line, ready to enjoy the fruits of your labor. It’s now time to move into the final, and arguably, most important, stage of your project: Quality Assurance.
Our developers and QA team are pretty obsessed with ensuring a seamless site launch. We’ve developed stringent protocols and testing practices to make sure that each website, whether it’s a mega eCommerce site or a fun content blog, goes live without any hiccups.
To make your life easier, we’ve compiled and are sharing with you a list of 6 of the most frequently overlooked WordPress “Go Live” checklist items to make sure your launch goes off without a hitch. You’re welcome!
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This post is part of a series on “Go Live” pre-launch checklists:
- 6 frequently overlooked “Go Live” checklist items: WordPress edition (current)
- 5 frequently overlooked “Go Live” checklist items: Magento edition
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6 frequently overlooked “Go Live” checklist items: WordPress edition
- Remove all references of the testing URL values from the live URL.
End users should never be able to see references to the testing URLs used during development. Be sure to remove them before the site goes live! - Make sure search engine indexing is turned ON.
Often during development, the WordPress search engine indexing feature is switched off to prevent the site from indexed on search engines prematurely. When the site is ready to go live, it is essential that indexing is turned ON. Otherwise, your site will not be indexed by Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines, and no one will be able to find your site! Major fail! - Check your site across multiple browsers.
We know you might very possibly hate Internet Explorer, but your site shouldn’t. Be sure to test site functionality across multiple platforms to avoid the unpleasant surprise of your site not working properly for some of your visitors after it’s been pushed live! - Check your site on more than just your own computer!
Test it on your friend’s laptop, on your Android phone, on your iPad; test the site from any and every device that can load a website. What looks and performs beautifully on your souped up computer with über high speed internet might leave something to be desired on another device. And you should definitely know, if that is the case. - Set up Analytics.
Large and small sites alike need and can benefit from having web analytics running on the site. Implementing a tool like Google Analytics, which offers robust features at even the free level, will help collect valuable data and feedback on both sites and visitors, providing crucial, actionable insights that can improve the website in the future. - Lorem ipsum text, begone!
Placeholder text is often used in place of real copy during development. Lorem ipsum text is ubiquitously used, with some developers and designers opting to generate their temporary text from various fun sources, like Fillerati for excerpts from classic authors, or Zombie Ipsum for those post-apocalyptic days! Regardless of what placeholder text you use, be sure to remove all traces of it before launching your site. Nothing worse than seeing gibberish (or creepy zombie mutterings!) in the About section of a newly-launched site!
With tons of components going into designing and developing a website, it’d be too easy to overlook the details without a systematic approach to checking off all the important items for your site launch. This is why a “Go Live” pre-launch checklist is so crucial.
We hope our frequently overlooked “Go Live” checklist items for WordPress were helpful! Stay tuned as we bring you another handy pre-launch checklist for the Magento platform next week!
Other check points?
Are there any other checklist points you would add? Share them with us in the comment below, or tweet us @Pixafy!
