You’ve poured over your website’s designs for hours, but it’s finished. You spent sleepless nights writing your content, and it’s (finally!) finalized. You’ve had your friends, family, and everyone you know review the site for errors and bugs.
It’s finally time to launch your website.
Take a deep breath because you’re not quite finished yet. There are a number of things you’ll want to do just before or after launching your website to make sure that you’re getting the most bang for your buck. After all, you did all that hard work; it’s important to make sure it wasn’t all for not.
Pre-Launch
Analytics
Before launching your site, make sure your Analytics is ready to go. Whether you decide to go with Google Analytics or another system, it’s important to have that code ready to go. So be sure to go through the process of signing up for the system of your choice and installing the code.
Create social accounts
If you don’t have them already, be sure to create whatever social media accounts you plan on using for your business. Start teasing the fact that you’ll be launching a new website soon and gain likes or follows through advertising and asking friends/family.
The Day You Launch
Webmaster Tools
Since you have updated Google Analytics code, you can quickly and easily install Google Webmaster Tools to check for any errors that may occur as well as some other great statistics in addition to your Analytics. You can also install Bing Webmaster Tools here.
Final error check
Now that your website is launched, do a final check with Webmaster Tools and with the help of your friends and family as they review the website.
Get indexed quickly
Now that your website is launched, you’ll want to make sure it gets indexed as quickly as possible.
- Make sure search engines can find you by making sure the robots.txt file is allowing search engines to crawl your website. (In Google, there is a checkbox under Settings > Reading that disallows search engines. Make sure that is unchecked.)
- Submit your website to the search engines. Submit to Google in Search Console and Bing here.
- Get links from other websites, through social media, blogs, and other sites.
Market, market, market
It’s time to push the new website via your social channels, blog, and even a press release.
Now get to it…and happy launching!
