Part 1 - E-Commerce & Website Relaunch Checklist: Timing your Launch Date Comes First

4 minute read

Relaunch Checklist Series - What you can expect

Relaunching a website or e-commerce app can be an enormous task and difficult project. There is a high threat that you will burn lots of money, nerves and resources. A relaunch - from start to end - is a long process. It means digging into requirements, creating wireframes, user stories, discussing smallest design details with stakeholders, etc. While having already managed a bunch of relaunches, redesigns and deployments for e-commerce sites, I’d like to share my project management insights on this topic with you.

You can expect that this series about website relaunches and redesigns gives you insight details about best practices, with a focus on keeping costs low avoiding pitfalls and wrong decision makings and the most important thing - how to solve and manage problems pragmatically.

The first an most important thing you need to think about is for which date the launch should be scheduled. Sounds crazy, but it’s super helpful when thinking about huge, complex projects in a backwards manner. That brings your focus directly on the goal. Having the new e-commerce app or website living directly vividly in your mind will help you avoid getting on the wrong tracks, wasting time on unimportant topics or problems and to prioritize all the hundred of tasks until launch date arrives.

Be careful with the actual launch date. In most cases marketing or management will come up with launch date expectations that will always fall on the first day of a month, such as the 1st of February.

That actually sounds meaningful, but be careful your options are heavily limited:

The only possible launch dates are Tuesday or Wednesday! With this in mind you need to schedule your deployment in most cases even some days before the actual, desired launch date of your stakeholders! That will affect your whole timeline - keep that in mind.

So let’s take a look on the possible working week dates and how they fit for deployment and launching on production:

Avoid Mondays for relaunches, redesigns and deployments

It’s pretty simple - Monday is the worst day of the week - the team isn’t focused, you hadn’t any time to talk and review final test results, status quos, etc. There are many reasons - just let your team get a warm up on Monday.

Tuesday is the best day for releasing or deploying something really huge. The reason is simple - your team is focused and you have enough time to roll out hot fixes without getting into panic because weekend arrives.

Tuesday is a super perfect launch date, because it makes you super flexible - you have enough time to make decisions if problems occur as the weekend still needs three days to come.

Dont’t forget: On launch date - the upcoming weekend is one of your biggest threats!

So do the following on a Monday before Tuesday’s launch:

You can use Monday for a last heavy final smoke test on your test/development environment.

Inform your team, customer service, etc. about the upcoming launch date. You should have done that weeks before the official launch date, but to bring everyone on track one day before launch is always a good choice.

Go through the final deployment checklists.

Bring the team in launch day mood by focusing on this super important day.

Give your mgmt a last briefing of the exact timeline on launch date.

Wednesday is your backup relaunch day

In case you find a last bug on Monday or even on the launch date itself - Wednesday should be your back up plan. Your plan B relaunch date. Nothing more, nothing less.

Thursday is for small hot fixes only

Reserve Thursdays only for hot fixes after a relaunch as it’s just to risky that problems or bugs come out on early or late Friday. You won’t have time to roll out fixes, that will really fix your bug before the weekend starts!

Friday - relax, the weekend begins - check your analytics data

Ok so just to be clear - never deploy or launch a big change on a Friday! Never, ever do it. Period.

The simple answer to this question is: Before your users or customers usually visit your website or e-commerce application. You just don’t want your customer experience bad performance or strange UI effects because of corrupted caching behavior.

In many cases I’d recommend something between five to six o’clock in the morning - but check your analytics data to get a better, individual view on this decision. Best would be 2 to 3 hours before a first traffic peak of users come in.

In this case you still have enough time to do smoke tests on your production environment, create test orders/transaction and make decisions about a potential roll back/hot fix if necessary.

What’s Next: Timelining your relaunch project

The next part of the relaunch check list series will be about the general project timeline. Here I’ll show you how to setup a general, high level project plan and how to plan your resources for your project. So stay tuned!