The Ultimate Website Launch Checklist: 49 Things To Do Before (and after) You Launch a Website

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It’s a lot of little things. That’s what web design is all about. There is a staggering number of ways to screw up.

So quality is all about details. To make sure nothing is missed, professionals use checklists. We have a ton of these checklists here at Orbit.

Here is our website launch checklist. Actually, this is a combination of several checklists related to launching websites. We’ve removed some of the internal communication items and added a few items related to marketing.

This checklist includes items from years of hard-earned experiences, mistakes and lessons learned.

We hope this will save you some of that pain. If you know someone working on a web design project, you can probably save them some grief by sharing this with them.

Content and Search Engine Optimization Checklist

Let’s start with the content itself. These steps will make sure that you follow on-page SEO best practices and that top content is all carefully migrated over.

You don’t necessarily need to move every page. But you need to find and move the top performing content based on traffic, rankings and link popularity.

1. Export your top-performing pages from Google Analytics.

Log into Google Analytics and go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages. Be sure to adjust the calendar and select a long timeframe (maybe 2-3 years).

These are your top pages on your website. Now select “Show rows” in the bottom right of this report to show more pages (the number you choose depends on how many pages you have on your website).

In the top right above the graph, choose “Export” and select a file format.

2. Use Search Console to find the pages that have been linked to the most. 

Log into Google Search Console. In the left column select Links > External links > More.

Again, you’ll want to expand how many rows this report is showing and then download a list of “your most linked content.”

3. Use SEMrush

(or a similar tool) to export a list of high ranking pages.

You might find that the high ranking pages are the same as the high traffic pages so this may not be necessary.

Caution! If the current site ranks well and gets a lot of traffic from search engines, be sure to follow each step in this post before going live with a new site: How to Relaunch a High Ranking Website. Your traffic depends on it!

4. Combine these three lists into a spreadsheet.

Check the new site to make sure that these pages will still exist or that there is a closely related page for each. Make a list of all URLs for all the top pages on the old site and keep track of which URLs will be changed during the launch. Create 301 redirects from the old site pages to the new ones.

5. Create a content strategy workbook. 

Make a list of all URLs for all pages on the old site and keep track of which URLs will be changed during the launch. At Orbit, we include all the keyphrases, the page type (blog post, service pages, product page, etc…), the redirection plan, the total links to those pages, the header tags, title tags, page descriptions, etc..

It might look something like this…

Be sure to create 301 redirects from the old site pages to the new ones or make a quick note if you decide not to redirect them.

6. Review title tags

As part of your content strategy workbook, create a column for the current title tag and the new title tag. Title tags should meet the following criteria:

• Begin with the target keyphrase. Remember this is what shows up in the search results page so it should explain what that page is about.
• Title tags should be unique to each page
• It’s a good rule of thumb to keep your title tags around 55 characters including spaces. Anything much longer will get truncated in search results.

7. Review meta descriptions.

Meta descriptions are not a ranking factor but they do affect click through rates from search results pages so make them good!

Meta descriptions should meet the following criteria:

• Include the target keyphrase for the page
• Be unique to each page
• Include around 120 characters including spaces
• Be compelling and explain what the user can expect to find on that page.

Check out the full article here for the rest of the checklist.