Launching your website: the go-live checklist.

This document provides a list all the aspects that should be checked during the project build, final testing phase, and after the live deployment of a website, to ensure that the site has a successful launch.

Go-Live Checklist

Checks to be made during final testing phase.

• Check content copy and spelling is correct.
• Contact details, specifically email addresses and phone numbers on the site are correct.
• Browser & mobile/tablet device testing across all supported browsers.
• Fav & touch icons are in place.
• 404 page is working.
• SEO redirects are in place to map old website pages to the new ones.
• There are no broken internal/external links (Use a link checking tool such as Integrity)
• Images and optimised and alt and title tags are completed
• All resources such as scripts are minimised ready for the production environment and any debug modes are turned off.
• XML sitemap is in place and configured correctly.
• Canonical content tags are in place (if required)
• Page URLs are friendly
• Pages have good SEO titles and descriptions
• Pages have Open Graph metadata tags setup. (http://ogp.me/)
• Any social sharing buttons are setup with the correct sharing introduction text.
• Any external links to social media networks have the correct links on them and are working.
• Structured data such as company address has been tagged with schema.org tags.
• The terms & conditions, privacy policy & cookie popup notice are in place, and uses can opt out of cookies
• Make sure iThemes security module is installed and configured (if applicable)

Go-Live Testing

Once the site has going live, the following checks should be made

• SEO redirects are working
• All forms are working, they validate required fields and store/send content.
• Emails are being sent from the site to the correct address.
• The website domain has it’s SPF and DKIM records setup for server so that emails are sent correctly and not marked as junk emails.
• Register with Google Analytics
• Register and submit sitemap with Google Search console.
• Make sure robots.txt is setup correctly in live and test environments.
• Protected pages have been hidden from google indexing in .htaccess file, meta data and robots.txt file.
• Setup SSL certificates and ensure the site redirects any not secure requests to secure ones.
• Make sure live site is being backed up.
• Make sure live site has caching and compression in place.
• Check that all test user accounts have been removed, and that all CMS usernames and passwords have strong passwords.
• Has the iThemes security module been configured in the live environment, for specific settings such as file/directory permissions and file change notifications.
• Make sure any test sites have passwords protecting them so there is no change that Google can index them if the robots.txt file is ignored.

Detailed checklist for implementation and testing

The following items should be referred to during the design and build of the website.

Content

• Content Spelling: Run a spell check. Better still, get others involved. You can never have enough people making sure copy is correct. Look out for grammatical errors as well as checking for widows or orphaned words in important paragraphs.
• Copy: Make sure real copy is in place and all placeholder text is removed. There is nothing worse than seeing lorem ipsum in a mission statement.
• Contact Details: It seems obvious but make sure these are correct. Check phone numbers, check email addresses and test that these are working, make a call or send an email and check they are received.
• Copyright: If you plan on using a date in the copyright info make sure it is set to automatically refresh from the time stamp on the server, and that the copyright owner is correct.
• Terms: If you are providing a service or are involved in promotions then you will need terms available for visitors to read. If you are unsure as to how these should be written then consult a lawyer for best advice.
• Privacy: If you use cookies, capture data, or distribute data, then you need a privacy policy. Keep these simple and be clear on what data you collect, what you store, and what you pass onto your data processors. Provide details of how you can be contacted for further information. Make sure site has a cookie popup installed on first visit.
• Retina Displayed Images: With high definition screen and phones now being widely used, 2x image sizes should be used to ensure these users get a crisp display.  However, ensure that these images not too large to download on mobile devices without wifi connections.
• Use of SVGs. All icons and company logos where possible should use SVG images rather than jpegs. These tend to be smaller in download size, but more importantly render much crisper at different resolutions.

Functionality

• Browser Testing & Compatibility: Check the site works across all browsers and platforms.
• Favicon: Obvious, but this can be missed.
• Main Logo: Does the logo link to the home page?
• 404 Pages: Check you have these in place, make sure they signpost ways for a user to get back into the site or direct them to pages of interest with relevant links.
• Forms: Make sure forms process correctly and the user gets the correct acknowledgement that the form is sent. If the form contents are being sent by email make sure the submission is going to the correct address. Ensure that all forms have the correct opt-in confirmation text and fields.
• Links: Do internal page links work? Do all external links work and do they open in a new tab if so intended? Check that all external links have rel=”noopener noreferrer” in place to prevent reverse tabnabbing.
• Check for broken links using Integrity. Note: This is often happens when migrating WordPress content from test to live.
• RSS Feeds: Check whether they should be enabled or not.

Standards & Validation

• Accessibility: It’s easy to forget how inaccessible a webpage is for some users. Have you considered how assistive technologies such as screen readers will navigate your site?
• Contrast: This follows on from our point about accessibility. Using the very latest monitors it’s easy to see subtle differences in colour, be sure to test your site on multiple devices and laptops to make sure the design has clarity and text can be read.
• Text Size: Make text clear and easy to read, adjust line spacing and allow plenty of white space. Bigger, can mean better, when it comes to text on the web.
• Alt Tags: Make sure all images have clear descriptive ALT tags for the visually impaired. Not only that but without them they can’t be found in search engines.
• Consistency: Make sure common elements across the site are consistent to avoid confusing your users. Make buttons look like buttons, links look like links, and titles and text should be the consistent in size and colour.
• Device Compatibility: Consider how the website will be used across multiple devices, responsive or not your website should work for desktop and mobile web users.
• Validation: Always aim for 100% validity. If your site fails to validate fully don’t get too upset, but be sure to understand any errors in order to to eliminate any unwanted issues.

Sitemaps

• XML Sitemap: These are only ever used by search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. Create an XML Sitemap easily and submit it via Google Search Console. These will then be used to inform search engines about the pages you have published. Note: If your site has many images, these can also be included in the sitemap. (Note: This is good for product images for example)

Performance

Google offer a service which is great for checking a websites performance. (https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/scoring)

• Check site speed: You can use services such as Google Page Speed or Blame Stella to check the load times of your site’s pages.
• Image sizes: Keep your images as small as possible. Although network speeds are better than ever, no one wants to wait for a 10Mb page to load. Compressing images will only improve page load times.
• CDN: Can you load certain included libraries from a separate server to decrease load on your hosting server.
• Minimised Code: Has all your code been minimised to make file sizes smaller..
  Page Caching: If applicable have you installed page caching to increase the performance of the site.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

• Keyword Research: Make sure you are targeting the right demographic and market. It’s important to get this right in order to attract relevant traffic to your site.
  Page Titles & Descriptions: Do all the templates have the necessary page titles and meta data based on your keyword research?
• Image Alt-tags: Do the main images of the site contain relevant and descriptive alt-tags? Using short descriptions will help. And remember try and choose a descriptive file name instead of random words and numbers for these images.
• Keywords: Embed these in titles, descriptions and copy.
• Content: If the content is good it will work to optimise and compliment the SEO. Good keyword density within the copy works well so use both singular and plural forms of keywords in your text.
• Friendly URLs: Make sure the site’s URLs are clean. Using a descriptive URL instead of ones that are made up of random numbers or words will help with SEO and visitors finding a page they may want to return to.
• Page Re-directs: If you are creating a new site, make sure all existing pages on the current site are re-directed to the new site using 301 redirects.

Analytics

• Install Google Analytics: In order to suggest improvements going forwards make sure GA is setup on the site. Look to see what conversions or event tracking can be added to give an indication of how well the site is performing. This way you can monitor traffic and site stats for the client and suggest improvements over the following month and year after launch.

Security

• iThemes security: For WP sites make sure this plugin is installed, and make sure the core customisations such as the admin paths are hidden.
• Protect Sensitive Pages: Protect any sensitive pages or folders from being indexed on search engines by putting in place robots.txt files and by excluding them from within Webmaster Tools.
• Documents: Make sure any documents included in the site are not accessible within the public available website. Use a document handler to get them from elsewhere on the file system.
  Security Certificates: If a site has a secure login section, or stores any sensitive user data make sure an SSL certificate is installed.
• Personal User Data: If the site collects and stores users data, ensure that is it secure and only retained for the time it is required.
• CMS usernames and passwords: Ensure all usernames have strong randomly generated passwords.  Make sure any test users have been removed from the live environment.

Hosting & Backups

• Backups: Make sure you use a provider who can provide daily and weekly backups of your server and make sure to take local backups as well.
• Server Caching and Compression: Using modules such as expires.r and deflate you can get the server to cache files and compress files to increase the speed they are sent to the user.
• Server Access: Ensure access to your servers are locked down with SSH keys and local IP addresses.