What do you need to do to make sure your website is successful? At Exygy, we launch several new websites each month, so we’ve compiled a checklist of post-launch to-dos that we do (or recommend) for all our clients.
Note: A lot of the sites we build are on WordPress, so we’ll offer plenty of WordPress-specific tips here, but these principles apply to all websites.
Security is a large topic. It could be its own article, or even series of articles. But we’ll just cover the basics here.
Be sure that ALL passwords are secure ones. That goes for your website logins, FTP accounts, github/bitbucket accounts, hosting accounts and registrar accounts. We use LastPass to store (and share) our passwords securely.
If your site is built on WordPress, be sure to keep the WordPress core and your plugins updated regularly. And consider using a dedicated WordPress host such as WP Engine (Exygy’s preferred host) for even tighter security (and great support, too!).
Be sure your site is indexable by search engines. This should be a no-brainer, but I have to admit there’s been at least one time where I’ve launched a site and then noticed several weeks later that the robots.txt file was disallowing search engines!
If your site is built on WordPress, go to Settings > Reading, and make sure the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” checkbox isn’t checked.
What does that mean? It means you should at least be able to easily set the title, meta keywords and meta description for each page and blog post on your site.
If you’re using WordPress, there are lots of SEO plugins available. We typically use the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin for most of our clients.
There are all kinds of plugins available for social sharing, especially if you’re using WordPress. When it comes to choosing a plugin, see The Definitive Guide to Evaluating a WordPress Plugin.
Which social networks should you add? That’s up to you to decide, based on which networks you’re targeting, what type of site you have, and what your visitors prefer. But as always, less is more. Try to limit it to 3 or 4 carefully chosen “share” buttons.
Make sure to install Google Analytics or some other analytics platform. You’ll want to track your site’s visits and visitor behavior over time.
If you’re using WordPress, you can easily install one of several Google Analytics plugins, which will add your analytics tracking code to your website without having to modify your site.
It’s important to know 1) that your site will continue to be supported after launch, and 2) who to call when something breaks.
Make sure the company that built your website will either offer you support, or refer you to another company that offers support.
Knowing who to call:
– If the site goes down, loads slowly, or has any other issues related to loading, it’s best to contact your web host. They can let you know if there’s something wrong with the server, and can usually get you back up and running pretty quickly.
– For any other problems, such as errors, broken images or functionality, misspellings, and things just not working right, contact the company that’s providing your website support.
The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.
A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!
Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.
