Finally, after thousands of hours working hard to develop your website, it's time to launch. But before going live, has your website finished preliminary steps?

"Don't make me think” is the first caution and also the title of a book by Steve Krug to emphasize the importance of not puzzling out the visitors. The point of your live website is to not make your visitors stop and think what and how they should do. And don't waste their time. Another seconds waiting increases your chances of losing your customers.

But it's not all about customers, you have to make sure that you double check all the issues of the website to ascertain that your website runs smoothly. Do a functional testing. Get search engines optimized. Ensure that security is set up so that no trouble will arise. Now, I'll give you a detailed web launch checklist.

Content

Grammar, spelling, punctuation

Don’t let trivial things cause bad impressions on visitors.

Intent of the page.

Who are your target visitors? What is the sole purpose your page trying to get across to the visitors?

Contact page.

Is it easy for visitors to contact you? If you use a contact form, make sure to test it.

Legal policy

Have a privacy policy, terms of use & disclaimer to protect your site content, products.

Design

Favicon

Don’t forget to have a Favicon. It’s the brand image and one of the first impressions of your site.

Responsive design

Use these tools to check your site on different resolutions: Responsinator and Studio Press

404 pages

Have a customized 404 page. Don’t let visitor escape your site because of a 404 page.

Images

Are images well displayed on normal devices and other high resolution display like Apple’s Retina display?

Fonts

Format is consistent, and make it easy to read.

Functional Testing

Forms

Are they properly working? Does the form get sent to the appropriate person? Does a thank you message or page display appears after form being submitted?

Code validation

Use this tool

Compatibility

Is your website displayed well on all popular browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE,...) & platforms?

Links

Check all internal & external links. Are they still valid? Use tool like screaming frogs to check all link status or xenu for broken links.

Redirect

Have you redirected old & broken links to the new ones? And what links needs a 301 permanent redirect or a 302 temporary?

Performance

Site speed

Site speed does affect user experience & search engine crawling. A website with less than 2s loading is optimal. Check with tools like pingdom and gtmetrix.

Page size

Minify/compress static (JavaScript/HTML/CSS) and image files for better page performance.

SEO/Marketing

Google Webmaster + Bing Webmaster

Validate your site with both tools to know your website’s status in search engines.

Google Analytics

Nuff said. A must have analytics tool for your website.

Page Title

Does the page title tell exactly the main content of the page?

URL

Have a clean URL for ease of view and to get optimized for search engines

Meta Description

Does the meta description blend in well with the page title & the content? Are they displayed well on search engine?

Sitemap

Submit a Sitemap to search engines to get your website indexed.

Social Media Integration

Do you include all of your main social networking account (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin,...)on your website?

Alt tag

Make sure all images have alt tag for search engines to read images.

Newsletter Signup

Do you have a way for returning visitors to know important events from your website?

Security

Monitor

Setup services such as Pingdom or Siteuptime tools to monitor the health of your server. Create SMS/email alerts for exception notifications and server monitoring

Back up

Configure backup schedule. What’s more devastating than losing all the valuable information but forget to back up the data in the first place?

Loading test

What could happen if suddenly your website were pressed with heavy traffic. Use tools like webperformance or load impact for testing?