Reading time: 12 minutes 39 seconds
Published: December 21 2022
Updated: August 24 2023
Kinga Edwards, CEO at Brainy Bees
The Only Website Design Checklist You Will Ever Need
When you’re starting a website, there are a lot of things to think about. What design should you choose? What content should you create? How can you ensure your website is effective and user-friendly?
This checklist will help take the guesswork out of creating and maintaining your website. We’ll walk through everything from setting up your domain name to optimizing your site for search engines.
How Do You Announce a New Website Launch?
Announcing a new website launch is a crucial step in marketing and creating buzz around your online presence. There are several effective ways to make this announcement. Social media platforms play a vital role in reaching a wider audience. By posting a teaser or countdown on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, you can generate excitement and anticipation among your followers. Sending out a well-crafted email newsletter to your subscriber list is another effective way to announce your website launch. You can provide a sneak peek of the new website's features and benefits to attract your audience's attention. To maximize visibility, consider collaborating with influencers or bloggers in your industry who can promote the launch to their own audience. Finally, don't forget to update your current website with a prominent banner or pop-up message that highlights the upcoming launch.
What is a website design checklist?
Announcing a new website launch is an exciting endeavor, as it marks the culmination of months or even years of hard work and planning. One way to effectively announce the launch is through a well-executed website design checklist. A website design checklist is a comprehensive list of tasks and considerations that need to be completed before the website goes live. It includes items such as ensuring the website is user-friendly and mobile responsive, testing all features and functionalities, optimizing loading speed, and checking for any broken links. By following a website design checklist, businesses can ensure that their new website is visually appealing, user-friendly, and optimized for performance. Once all the checklist items are complete, the announcement of the new website launch can be made. This announcement can take various forms, such as a press release, a social media post, or an email to subscribers. The goal is to generate excitement and drive traffic to the newly launched website, thereby maximizing its potential impact and success.
Why do you need a website checklist?
This is straightforward. With a web development checklist, you can make sure that you’ve covered all of the important bases in design process before launching. It’s a valuable tool for streamlining your website process and ensuring that everything is taken care of in an organized and timely manner. Having a website launch checklist is crucial for increasing website traffic. When you launch your website without a checklist, it is highly likely that you might miss out on some important details such as optimizing your website for search engines or testing it for user-friendliness. These factors play a vital role in attracting and retaining website visitors, which ultimately leads to an increase in website traffic.
Ultimate website launch checklist
#1 Set your goals
Before you launch your website, you need to establish your motivation for doing so. What are you hoping to achieve with your website? Are you looking to make it part of your sales strategy for your products or services? Do you want to generate leads? Perhaps increase your ecommerce business valuation?
Once you know your goals, you can start to develop a plan to achieve them. This will make it easier for you to stay on track with creating a website that is tailored to your objectives and optimized for success.
Starting without a goal, or a plan is like starting a journey without knowing where you want to go – so you might want to admit here that you don’t have a goal yet.
#2 Choose a domain name
Domain names are like the address of your new website. They're how people find you online. And, if you don't already have one, it’s the first step you need to take. So head over to a domain name registrar and pick one that will best represent your website.
Remember that your URL also has an impact on how you will be perceived by search engines. With that being said, ensure that it's straightforward and memorable.
This will also impact your website accessibility. Let's assume that you’re creating a website for people with visual impairments. In this case, you should prioritize domain names that are easy to spell and pronounce.
#3 Set up hosting
You’ve got your domain name all sorted? Well done you! The next step is to set up web hosting. This will ensure that your website is live and accessible for people to access 24/7, and that's exactly what you'd expect, isn't it?
The better hosting you have, the more reliable your website will be. As such, take the time to choose a hosting provider that offers good uptime and customer support (e.g., via live chat) by researching different providers, their offerings, and the opinions of existing users.
Your website launch checklist wouldn't be complete without web hosting, so don't skip this step.
#4 Pick a web building platform
There are many different platforms available for designing and building websites if you don't have the technical skills to build one from scratch.
Among website builders, you can use is WebWave.
Hundreds of website-building solutions may look the same at first, but with WebWave you can craft a truly awesome new site. It's like taking the canvas from Photoshop, adding layers from Figma and merging it with Canva to create your own designs and page layouts. Don't settle for what other builders have to offer – unleash your creativity with WebWave!
If you've ever imagined having your own personal online domain, look no further than WebWave! With its easy drag-and-drop website builder, you can design a beautifully unique new site from the ground up. Even if you're not web design savvy, don't worry! WebWave also offers plenty of templates for you to choose from – allowing you to customize and modify site pages whatever way works best for you. No coding required! WebWave is like having your very own website designing and hosting dream team right at your fingertips – so why wait any longer? Start creating stunningly stylish web pages today with WebWave's intuitive platform – and get ready for your website launch with a bang.
Create a website that looks good no matter the device— desktop, tablet, mobile devices and more. With this responsive website builder, you can tailor your web pages to any device quickly and easily. No more having to hand-tweak code for each device. Just make all the adjustments you need in one place for a perfectly responsive website that sets you apart from your competitors. Put an extra swish in your site so everyone can check out your business with ease and get only positive user experience from the first click.
You can use it both for your new site or existing site, so you can easily add a few web design elements to existing sites and freshen up their look.
#5 Design your website
Taking the launch of any website seriously is essential for success, but when it comes to designing, organization is key. Take an organizational approach and create a “pre-launch checklist” for yourself and your team. Planning ahead is the cornerstone of launching smoothly, whether you’re building a new website or improving an existing one.
Start by brainstorming ideas, setting realistic timelines and making sure each part of the process works together seamlessly before moving on to the next task. Finally, have some fun as you go along. Inject a bit of wittiness into your content and don’t be afraid to play around with web design elements that make sense for your brand.
Embrace storytelling with colors and images; It will bring life to your project and increase user engagement significantly. Above all else, remember to take it step-by-step while still maintaining an unwavering commitment to excellence.
If it's a brand new website, it's probably a wise idea to create a brandbook with guidelines for your designs and content. These guidelines should be easy to follow, ensuring that your team is always in sync with your desired brand identity.
Also, don't forget that your new site should be optimized not only for search engines, but also for mobile devices. Adaptive design will help you reach more potential customers.
#6 Write the content
The text that appears on your website pages can make or break the success of your project. Poorly written content will only hurt your efforts and can be a turn-off for potential customers, so think about your target audience and the message you want to convey to them.
Take the time to craft compelling content that is accurate, concise, and communicates your message effectively. Great content such as ebooks or instructional videos can even earn you passive income. If you’re feeling stuck, research ideas and write down your thoughts before beginning to write.
If writing isn’t your strong point, there are plenty of resources available to help you create high-quality content for your website. Alternatively, you could always hire a professional copywriter to do the job for you, if your budget allows this, of course.
WebWave AI Writer
Generate your website copy with just one click.
WebWave AI Writer
Generate your website copy with just one click.
Content should also be SEO optimized (yet more on that in a second). Don't forget about title tags, video files (e.g. evergreen webinars), meta descriptions, or social media handles in each blog post – this will have quite an impact on how your site appears in search results too.
In this stage, it's worth choosing the right content management system you will proceed with. Double check if it allows you to manage content properly, for example in terms of security and backups.
#7 Optimize for search engines
If you want people to be able to easily find your website, you need to optimize it for search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo!. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of making design your website in such a way that makes it easy for them to find and index your content, as well as rank it higher when people type in relevant search terms.
There are many factors that go into SEO, including optimizing your meta tags and descriptions, creating unique content, using keywords strategically throughout, and adding relevant images with alt tags, as well as a meta description, XML sitemap, or a tracking code.
Most SEO plugins and web crawlers will help you identify potential SEO issues, so be sure to review them and fix any problems if necessary. However, don't forget to keep your content unique and interesting at the same time – it's crucial for technical SEO implementation and Google Ranking factors.
It's also worth mentioning that SEO is an ongoing process, so it's important to constantly review your website for any errors, internal links, broken link issues, or outdated content. It's not a one-off – even if you already have "done it all" on an existing website, regular maintenance is essential to get the best out of SEO techniques.
Don't forget about Google Search Console! It will allow you to measure and monitor the performance of your site and make sure that search engines are able to access it.
By following these simple steps, you’ll be well on your way to launching a successful website in no time! With an effective checklist, thoughtful pre-launch planning, and polished content, you.
#8 Conduct testing
Once you have all the pieces in place, it’s time to verify that every aspect of your website is functioning as it should be. Test your website on different devices, browsers, and operating systems to make sure it appears correctly and runs as smoothly as possible on all of them. Having a staging site is a great way to test before the website goes live, making sure everything is up-to-date and ready for website launch. Usability testing on an ecommerce website could, for example, show you broken links, missing meta descriptions, broken social media handles, or non-functional SSL certificates. And, for Wordpress sites, it could uncover missing title tags, contact pages that don't appear in search engine results, or other off page SEO issues.
Look out for any bugs or errors in the code, and make sure all of your links are working properly. Check the speed of your website as well – if it takes too long to load, chances are people won’t stick around. According to research, over half of all web users expect a website to load in three seconds or less, and a quarter abandon a site that takes six seconds to do so.
#9 Rethink backups
Make sure you have a backup plan in place. Backing up your site regularly will help protect your data – and if you think about it, it’s like protecting your website’s health. There are a number of different methods you can use to back up your site, so consider which one would work best for you and ensure that you set a reminder to run the backup regularly.
It's a crucial step for your website checklist, as even the best, most secure websites can face unforeseen issues, and losing your data is something you want to avoid at all costs.
#10 Implement security measures
No website is immune to security risks such as ransomware attacks, and your site could be vulnerable if not secured properly even with all the best practices in place. As such, it's recommended to take the necessary steps to protect your website as much as possible from any malicious attacks.
Update your CMS with the latest patches, install and monitor your SSL certificate, use strong passwords with multi-factor authentication, and set up a firewall to shield your data. Also keep an eye on your server logs, as they can help you detect any suspicious activities and alert you of potential security threats. You can also use cloud monitoring tools to keep an eye on all of that.
A new site can be vulnerable to malware and other online threats, so ensure you take necessary steps to protect your data.
#11 Double-check all aspects
Your web page should be pleasing to the eye and user-friendly. Double check all aspects of your website such as code, web design, SEO, usability, accessibility, and more.
Ensure that all website checklist items have been addressed properly in order to create a well-rounded website: from web design consistency across all pages to meta tags or content optimization for search engines. Check if everyone knows how to use a content management system, check the architecture of the site's pages, use a few tools to check for broken links, external links, site loads, homepage displays, on page SEO, site's mobile readiness, meta descriptions, and 404 pages. Reconnect (if needed) to a Google Search Console before you run a new website launch. You want to collect necessary data from day one, so don’t forget to add Google analytics tracking code.
Major search engines like Google and Bing also have their own webmaster guidelines, including standards for HTML, coding, content quality, etc. Make sure your website is compliant with those standards before launching. And, in this step, it's worth reviewing XML sitemap once again – especially if you want to conquer search engine results pages straight away.
#12 Publish your website
You're happy with how your website looks and functions? It's time to launch your final website! Then, anyone will be able to type in your domain name into a browser and navigate your live website.
Launching your website simply means making your site live on the internet so people can start visiting it, usually by uploading your content to the hosting provider and pointing your domain name to their server or hitting the 'publish' button on your website builder's dashboard.
All the pages that you created should now be live and the content should appear properly online. If you want to make changes to your site in the future, remember that you can always go back into the CMS and make edits or add new pages as needed.
#13 Start promoting
Now that your website is live, it's time for some promotion. There are many different ways to promote a website, including social media marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, programmatic advertising, email marketing, and content marketing.
Design some promotional materials too – create engaging videos, conduct keyword research to build content clusters, leverage all the social media profiles you manage across various groups – and get the word out about your website.
With social media, you might want to consider setting up a business page to advertise your website. You can also use social media platforms such as Twitter and LinkedIn to promote your website or blog content, or even start a social media campaign to further reach out to potential customers. Leverage Whatsapp message templates too to keep your audience informed. Depending on the type of your new website, you might also want to consider setting up a contact page or an online store.
Also, remember that this is a continual process – keep an eye on your website analytics and adjust your strategies accordingly, as even the most popular websites need to be promoted in order to stay successful. Update your existing pieces of content and create new ones regularly to keep your website fresh and engaging.
Or, if you have a launch date already, you can send it as a countdown in your cold email marketing campaigns. Launching a website is usually a big event, so if you run e.g., an ecommerce site, you can use discount codes, create certificates/gift vouchers, or offers to make the launch extra special. Some guest post pitches might also be warmly welcomed, especially if these are complemented with special images and graphics.
These are just some of the ways to promote your website – explore other methods, test and measure their results, and get creative with your strategies.
#14 Check website analytics
Checking your website analytics is necessary to verify that your website is running as expected. With web analytics, you can track the number of visitors, their behavior, and geographic data. You'll also be able to identify areas that need improvement and create strategies based on the collected data.
See how many people are visiting your website and how they are interacting with it by using analytics platforms like Google Analytics or Crazy Egg. This will allow you to see what works and what doesn't, as well as uncover potential issues. Furthermore, these analytics tools provide useful insights into user demographics that can help inform and improve your marketing strategies. Google Analytics is free to use.
At the end of the day, it all comes down to understanding your target audience. Only by tracking website analytics can you gain this insight and make informed decisions on how to better serve your customers.
#15 Measure success with your website checklist
The last step is to measure the performance of your website in relation to your goals. This could mean tracking the number of visitors your website gets, the amount of sales you make, or simply monitoring how many people sign up.
The aim is to see if your website is successful in achieving its purpose, which means looking at user engagement, website performance, conversions, and other metrics that are relevant to your specific business goals. Doing so will allow you to implement changes (e.g. with SSL certificate or site launch materials) as needed to make your website meet your desired goals and objectives.
Your site's performance should be monitored on an ongoing basis, and you should stay vigilant for any changes or fluctuations in the data that could indicate a need for improvement. When done consistently, this will help ensure that your website is performing to its full potential.
New site launch is always an exciting time for any business. It's a chance to start fresh and make sure that your site is running as smoothly as possible. Measuring how it's going in search results, on page SEO, and, in general, post launch, is the right idea. With the right post launch website checklist and continuous monitoring, you can make sure your site is performing its best. That way, you will get the most out of it, allowing your business to grow and succeed.
#16 Enable your customers to reach out to you through customer service portals
In today's highly competitive business world, having a customer service portal on a company's website has become more important than ever. These portals offer customers a convenient way to access information, get answers to their queries, and receive support when they need it. Providing this type of service, businesses can enhance their customers' experience and build stronger relationships with them, which can ultimately lead to increased loyalty and revenue.
One of the primary benefits of having a customer service portal on a company's website is that it can significantly reduce the workload of customer service representatives. Giving customers self-service options, such as a comprehensive FAQ section or online chat support, businesses can alleviate the volume of phone and email inquiries that their customer service team has to handle. This not only improves the efficiency of the customer service team but also allows them to focus on more complex issues that require their attention.
Follow your website launch checklist
The only website checklist you’ll ever need is complete – just review it regularly and keep updating it with new items as technology advances. Covering all of the elements of this website post launch checklist will practically guarantee a well-designed, functional, and secure website for all of your visitors to enjoy.
Also, remember that this comprehensive website launch checklist is just a template for your successful website launch. You can adjust it to fit your specific needs and adapt it as technology evolves. So don’t forget to revisit it regularly and keep an eye out for anything new that may need to be added.
If you are planning to build a website, it is essential to follow a comprehensive website launch checklist. One of the critical elements of this checklist is responsive design. Your website must be accessible on all devices, including desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. With the rising number of mobile internet users, having a responsive website design is crucial to attracting and retaining traffic to your website.
Now that you're armed with this pre launch website checklist, you should have no trouble launching a successful website. Don't forget these steps every time you build or update a website, and you'll be on the path to success. And then, you should think about a post launch checklist too – maybe we'll cover it in our next article?
Other articles.
WebWave website builder is your AI-powered solution for building an online presence. Create your website in 3 minutes, add an online store or a blog, and grow your business.
We created this website with WebWave.
Follow us on social media
Company.
Help.
Templates.