The Ultimate WordPress Launch Checklist

Overview

In this post, we’ll talk about the ultimate checklist you pull out once your WordPress site is finished and ready to be shared with the world. Just make sure that you’ve crossed all the t’s and dotted the i’s. The next paragraph has the whole checklist in point format. Then we’ll elaborate on each topic in further depth.

The List

• Backup your website
• Double-check your content
• Update to the latest version of WordPress
• Update the plugins and themes
• Make sure the site is responsive
• Cross-browser compatibility
• Secure your website
• Change the admin email
• Make sure your site is “Crawlable”
• Check the page load speed
• Compress all images
• Remove the broken links
• Check all of the internal and external links
• SEO
• Disable the “Coming soon” page
• This is it

“You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great”

Zig Ziglar

Backup your website

These days, there is no reason not to back up your website because doing so is so simple. Simply install a plugin and you are good to go.

Double-check your content

Before launching, take a moment or two to confirm that all of your content is organized correctly. Are all of the pages and posts present? Are the permalinks appropriately configured? Are the post categories and tags accurate? The submission forms are they functional?

Update to the latest version of WordPress

The most recent versions of WordPress include security fixes, maintenance updates, and other goodies that make your site function better. Make sure to update so before launching your website.

Update the plugins and themes

Make sure to update plugins and themes, just like you should with WordPress itself. Security vulnerabilities detected in outdated WordPress core files, plugin files, and theme files are the most frequent access points for hackers. To summarize, always update before going live and whenever a new version is released.

Make sure the site is responsive

A responsive website is one whose design and content adapt to the visitor’s device’s screen size. A completely responsive website will be viewable and useful on any cutting-edge device. Although that seems obvious, it’s actually very challenging to do it correctly. You must check each page or page template, even in the most well-known page builders like Elementor, to make sure it displays properly on tablets and mobile devices.

Cross-browser compatibility

Through this kind of testing, you can be confident that your website is functional and accessible across the widest range of browsers.

Secure your website

You must take your website security extremely seriously because more than 50,000 WordPress sites are hacked every day. You could believe that since your website is new and has little traffic, hackers won’t be interested in it. Numerous factors exist that make it possible for your website to be hacked without any traffic.

Change the admin email

Go to “Settings” in your Dashboard and click “General”. Here you can be able to change the admin email. All of the important notifications are sent to this email.

Make sure your site is “Crawlable”

Go to “Settings” in your Dashboard and click “Reading”. Don’t forget to uncheck the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”. If it is not unchecked, during your prelaunch, you may get very little search engine traffic and not know why. Don’t forget to uncheck this option.

Check the page load speed

To make your page faster, use GTMetrix or Google Page Speed Insights. Site speed is advantageous for user experience and affects Google rankings.

Compress all images

Compressing all of the photos on your website is a simple and quick technique to increase page performance (JPGs, PNG, GIF, WebP). Either manually do this task or install a plugin.

Remove the broken links

This is a crucial action to do. When you are making several last-minute adjustments before your site goes live, it is simple for links to fail. A link that “breaks” indicates that the page it was pointing to has disappeared. The visitor will then see a 404 error. Why is it important if you have 404 errors? There are two causes: your website visitors aren’t finding what they’re searching for, and Google doesn’t like it when there are a lot of 404 errors.

The Broken Link Checker plugin will find all of the broken links on your website and fix them before you go live. Also, this plugin detects missing images and redirects.

Check all of the internal and external links

Although you most likely have checked this in the testing environment, it’s always a good idea to double-check everything before launching to ensure that all links are functioning properly. The link checker from the previous paragraph merely verifies that a link is functional; it does not verify if it points to the intended location or not.

SEO

Search engine optimization, or SEO. It’s a fancy word for bringing people from search engines to your website.

• make sure your website is ‘crawlable’
• make sure your permalinks are set to /%postname%/
• do topic research for all the posts you publish to make sure that you are targeting topics that actually being searched for in search engines
• make sure your focus word is included in the title of your post

For more SEO tips visit this link.

Disable the “Coming soon” page

This is the final step, Disable the page and you can publish your website.