According to Siteefy, there are over one billion websites online now. While around 80% are considered inactive, a billion websites are still an impressive number, especially when you’re competing against it. The question thus becomes – how to launch a website that is memorable in a sea of others? Is the secret in the color palette, the features, or the smoothness of the backend?
In an effort to answer this dilemma, this article presents you with several great tips for successfully launching your first personal or business website!
The first step – a launch checklist
While they may seem pointless, checklists are there for a reason. When each department and employee know their tasks, the risk of human error is significantly reduced. Thus, just like rockets, website launches also require checklists.
Before putting a checklist together, there are a few pivotal points to consider. For one, a checklist should sum up all the key requirements and tasks for a given project. This will leave no stone unturned, and no department confused as to what their assignments are. Furthermore, checklists make the workload transparent. When every colleague has an overview of assignments, they will rarely remain incomplete. In short, your checklist is your game plan – something to never go without.
The second step – a little help from Google Analytics
When you launch a website, that is never the end of it. Once it is up and running, the question becomes – how is it performing?
Even though a website’s performance isn’t visible to the untrained eye, this information is by no means out of reach – just the opposite. A free analytic tool such as Google Analytics will provide you with information about your website’s performance. It will track various actions, events, and performance metrics on your website, providing you with the information necessary to move forward.
Of course, it is not unusual for a website to perform poorly during its first few months of activity. However, if a falling trend becomes persistent, it may be time to hire an experienced digital marketing agency specialised in SEO services. As website performance falls into their area of expertise, SEO companies will be able to pinpoint the problem and suggest multiple solutions to enhance performance and increase website visibility.
The third step – there is no such thing as too much testing
The third point on this list cannot be stressed enough – test everything. Even though a launch checklist will provide an overview of the assignments in need of completion, it will not provide quality assurance. For this, you will need to use a QA/Testing tool. While there are many on the market, a quality testing tool should be able to perform an internal QA along with client feedback all in one platform. As a result, you will receive valuable information that may later be passed on to your SEO adviser to improve visibility and performance.
The fourth step – the importance of determining the launch date
It is said that timing is (almost) everything in business and the same may be argued for website launches. Ideally, we would wish to launch a website during optimal traffic to increase visibility. Thus, novel websites often fall into the trap of launching just before the weekend or during the holiday season. This practice is not recommended for a couple of reasons.
For one, bumps and bruises are inevitably going to appear during a website launch and a team needs to be in place to fix them in real-time. However, when a website goes up just before the weekend, a team may not be available to fix the issues that pop up. Ideally, launches are best scheduled before the beginning of the workday or even the work week. This way, a team will be able to track its performance during the entire day and interfere if any problems arise.
The fifth (and final) step – promotion, promotion, promotion!
These days, people will rarely hear of a new product without extensive promotion. The same is true for websites. Therefore, before the official launch, you need to make promoting the website a top priority. However, prior to designing the promotional campaign, there are a few points worth considering.
For one, re-evaluate your consumer base – who are the people you expect to find on your website? If your audience is composed of the younger generations, an Instagram or TikTok campaign is highly recommended. Conversely, if the people you aim to reach are not as tech-savvy as others, focus on creating an offline campaign to reach them.
While this article has provided several tips for launching a website, all of them may be summed up with one word – preparation. Knowing your audience, proper planning, and performance are key factors for a successful website launch. Once it’s up and running, all that’s left to do is track it and improve it!