You can be on Entrepreneur’s cover!

Five Things To Check Before Your New Website Goes Live Although it can be tempting to rush along and push the "go live" button, there are literally dozens things that one should check and verify before making that call.

By Mark Hirst

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

You're reading Entrepreneur Middle East, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.

Shutterstock

Great; your new website is complete and ready to go live. Exciting times. Although it can be tempting to rush along and push the "go live" button, there are literally dozens things that one should check and verify before making that call. These checks range from aesthetic, content and style checks to functional, security, performance and search engine optimization (SEO) checks. Any reputable web developer will automatically do most of these for you, which is great, considering that many of the checklist items are quite technical. But there are also a number of items that, as a website owner, you should verify yourself to make sure you're satisfied. Here are five such items.

1. 301 redirects

If it's a website redesign that you're doing, then you'll probably want to set up 301 redirects. The reason is because your current website pages have been indexed by search engines, and they have some sort of page rank associated with them that you'd probably want to maintain. When you update your website, these pages will more than likely either not exist anymore, or will have moved.

For example, say on your current website, you have a page about your company located at www.domain.com/about/, and on the new website, this page has changed to www.domain.com/company-profile/, then you'll want to tell the search engines about the move. 301 redirects essentially tell search engines where the corresponding pages on the old site reside on the new site. This way the page rank may be transferred from one to the other and not lost in the ether. Be sure to ask your website developer to set this up for you.

2. Analytics

Having a brand new website is great, but it's even better when you have analytics installed. Analytics will tell you all sorts of useful information such and where your website visitors are coming from, which pages they visit, where they leave your website from and so on.

Installing analytics may not be done automatically by your web developer so you'll need to check that it is. Google provide a great free analytics tool (https://www.google.com/analytics/), which is very straightforward for the web developer to install. It's recommended that you use this as a minimum. There are also a plethora of more advanced but paid analytics tools out there, if you're so inclined.

3. Browsers and devices

This task would have been done by your web developer, but there's no harm in checking that you are happy with what's been done, since, as a website owner, it can be easy to overlook this. Just because you use Firefox as your default browser and your phone is a Samsung Galaxy S does not mean that everyone else does. Your customers will be using all sorts of browsers and devices, so it's important that the site works on everything.

Related: Launching A Startup? Ask Yourself These Questions First

For browsers, you'll want to check your website on Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. To see which browsers to focus on more check the analytics of your current website to see what most people are using when they visit your site. If it's a brand new website you can go by the statistics here: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

You'll also want to check your site on some phones and tablets. It'd be close to impossible to check everything, of course, but there are a couple handy browsers tools you can use to come close. This is one for example: http://www.dimensionstoolkit.com/

Be sure to check everything- not just how it looks. For example, fill in any forms you might have and make sure they work. Does the form validation work? Did you get the email response? Perform a search, use the map, download the press release, etc. In short, be sure to check the interactive features, as well as the style and presentation.

4. Performance

Speed is very important these days. It can mean the difference between a high bounce rate and a low one. Even your page rank is affected by the speed of your site.

It may be tricky to check this before actually going live, because prior to the launch, the site is most probably sitting on a developer/staging server, and so the results may not be accurate. You can check it as soon as the site goes live though, and there are several tools available for this. One handy one is provided by Google here: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

5. Go live at the right time

Lastly, even if your website is ready and checked and verified to go at the end of the week, it's not recommended to go live, say on a Thursday. Computers can be a bit unpredictable at times, and things can often go wrong. Either the server is not fully compatible with the website, or data is lost on the upload. Whatever it is, going live before the weekend is risky, because you could end up with a broken website sitting in all its glory for the world to see for a couple of days. It's much safer to go live at the start to middle of the week, so that in case something is wrong, your web developer can fix it right away.

Related: Keep It Simple: Why Simplicity Is Key To Making Your Brand Win

Mark Hirst

Founder and CEO, Blue Beetle

Mark Hirst is the founder and CEO of Blue Beetle, a full-service digital agency based in Dubai.

Hirst started Blue Beetle in early 2004, after having worked for a number of years in the UK and the Netherlands on various international multimedia projects. Within its 12 years of operation, Blue Beetle has grown into a comprehensive and integrated digital agency with prominent clients across all major industry sectors, including leading brands in hospitality, retail, F&B, technology, and property development/real estate.

As founder and CEO, Hirst is responsible for providing the vision, overall leadership and strategic management for Blue Beetle, as well as in ensuring the quality of the services provided. Hirst holds a BA in Industrial Design from Loughborough University in the UK. When he is not working, Hirst can be seen spending quality time with his friends and family, exercising and playing sports and exploring the great outdoors.

Thought Leaders

How To Improve Your Soft Skills and Emotional Intelligence in 7 Easy Steps

Using these simple but effective approaches will help a person in their business, life and relationships.

Finance

The Recap: Leaders In Fintech Awards 2023

The Leaders in Fintech Awards 2023 was staged by Entrepreneur Middle East with the support of in5, Idealz One, Numei Real Estate and Fluidmeet.

Business News

Kevin O'Leary Says 'Do Not' Merge Finances, Bank Accounts With Your Spouse: 'I Forbid It in My Own Family'

The "Shark Tank" star stressed the importance of keeping your "own financial identity" in a relationship.

Starting a Business

8 Tips for Increasing Your Average Sale

Getting a few more dollars out of each customer can put startups on a fast track to success.

Productivity

How I Take Advantage of My ADHD With Hyperfocus

Hyperfocus is a common but little-known asset of ADHD. It is the ability to focus intensely on something for hours or days at a time.

Business News

'Wildly Inappropriate': Woman Says She Was Denied a Job Because She Didn't Wear Makeup During the Interview

Melissa Weaver was applying for a VP of HR job at a tech company via video.