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By Harry Robinson•5th December 2024
When you have an idea for your business, creating a website plays a big role in getting it off the ground and establishing your digital presence.
Are you interested in launching a website on WordPress? If so, there’s a lot you need to think about.
Launching a website on WordPress can be challenging, especially if it’s your first time doing it. While you might be excited to transform your ideas into a reality, you probably don’t know where to start.
We know how frustrating this can feel, and that’s why we’ve put together the ultimate WordPress website launch checklist.
In this article, we’ll cover all the essentials when it comes to how to launch a website in WordPress effectively. We’ll also examine how QualityHive can help you streamline website development and ensure your site meets all your key objectives.
Once you’ve completed this checklist, you should have a dynamic website that’s ready to share with the world.
One of the first items on your WordPress website launch checklist is signing up for an account with WordPress.com. Ensure you choose the plan that best suits your needs, then choose and type in your domain name (note: you will need to check that your preferred domain is available and buy it in advance).
You’ll now be ready to choose a design to base your website on. You don’t need to spend too long choosing a theme, as you can always choose a different theme later if needed. If you are struggling to choose a theme, you could always contact a developer to custom build you one.
QualityHive’s task management features allow you to streamline the website design process and ensure your team follows a well-organised plan.
As the second item on the website go live checklist, your navigation menu(s) is an essential part of pre-launch planning. Proper navigation can determine the final user experience, so you need to take your time with this.
Ideally, your navigation menu needs to be visible on all pages and follow a logical structure. The menu has to be easy to use as well as consistent throughout your site.
Many websites use a contact form to record data belonging to customers or potential customers for subscriptions or lead generation purposes.
Before launching your website in WordPress, you need to ensure your forms are displaying and functioning correctly. Try to get the design as clean and professional-looking as possible and ensure your data collection forms are stored in the right place.
The next step on your WordPress website launch checklist is looking for broken links and images. One way to do this is to visit your website from a browser that’s never been used to view the site to ensure that your browser isn’t loading any images from the cache.
Broken links can be frustrating for users and harm your SEO. There are many tools available that can help you quickly find broken links.
QualityHive’s unique video and image recording features make it easier to spot bugs. This allows you to ensure quality assurance, prioritise addressing broken links or images, and assign them to the relevant people, ensuring that they’re resolved quickly and effectively.
While we all make mistakes, poor grammar or spelling mistakes are small details that make a big difference to the overall quality of your website. Having more than one or two minor errors on your website can impact your business credibility and cause you to even lose the trust of your users.
The good news is that there are many tools and plugins available that can help you spot and fix these mistakes. QualityHive’s feedback management system allows team members to highlight and comment on specific sections of website copy. This helps you identify any typos or grammatical errors and address them quickly.
The next step on your WordPress website launch checklist is visiting your site’s pages from various types of devices, such as desktops, tablets, and mobile phones. Ideally, your site needs to respond quickly and adjust its layout based on the screen being used.
It’s also important to test your website on as many different browsers as possible, including Google Chrome, Firefox, and Safari for Mac users.
Prior to launching your website, you need to be able to track its performance. With all the work you’ve put into building and preparing your website, you’ll want to know exactly how many users are visiting, how they reached your site, and where they spend their time.
Google Analytics is a standard choice for many website owners who want to track this data. There are a number of great plugins that you can use to easily integrate Google Analytics with WordPress.
Your web pages will appear on Google’s SERPs with a page title (meta title) and description (meta description). The title links to the web page that has information relating to the search, while the description gives more information about the page’s content.
Optimising your page titles and meta descriptions is an important part of your WordPress website launch checklist, as these elements encourage searchers to click on your website.
Backups are absolutely essential for any website. If something goes wrong and your website loses all its data, a backup allows you to restore your site to the previous version.
Backups serve as an insurance policy, making them indispensable on any website go live checklist. There are many WordPress backup plugins to choose from, and they usually only take a couple of minutes to set up. Choose the plugin that best suits your needs and automatically schedules backups to save to the cloud.
Finally, with your backup in place, the last item on your WordPress website launch checklist is website security.
With advancing technology, cyberattacks pose a real threat to any website. By adding robust security protocols to your website, you can guard it against potential threats.
Launching a website on WordPress can seem challenging, but with our checklist, you’ll be able to build a user-friendly website in no time. Alongside this checklist, having the right support tools can also help you further streamline the web development process.
QualityHive is a website feedback and task management tool that helps web developers create dynamic websites. With our comprehensive feedback tool, you can share detailed feedback, reduce misunderstandings, and monitor task progress within your team.
QualityHive allows you to save countless hours of development time per project and provides you with everything you need to create exceptional digital products.
We offer different plans to effectively cater to teams of all sizes and boost your productivity.
Learn more about our features here, and book a demo with QualityHive today.
