The Ultimate Website Prelaunch Checklist
Posted in Web strategy on: Monday, February 8, 2010 by Andy Wickes
All of a sudden the site you have been working on for months is approved and the client wants it live. However, things can still go horribly wrong if you are not prepared.
We’ve all been there.
After months of development, meetings, conference calls, protracted arguments over typography, photography, colour ways and copy. All of a sudden the site is approved and the client wants it live.
Do you think to yourself, ‘I know every pixel on this site inside out’ and put it live?
Hopefully not. You’ll have a printed checklist which you complete before you go public.
By no means is this an exhaustive list. Neither is it presented in any particular order. Your own checklist will be very much tailored towards your own individual clients and the type of project you are delivering. Be sure to add your thoughts and suggestions to the comments at the bottom of the page.
Either way, get your team together, get out the red pen and start ticking them off.
Copy Checks
Check your spelling.
If it comes down to a web designer to highlight the smelling pistakes of a copywriter then so be it. Show the world you are no slouch and run a spell check. Better still, get your copywriter / project manager to do this. Be sure you check for widows or orphaned items in important paragraphs too.
Check your tone of voice.
Ensure this is consistent across all your pages, that your audience is being addressed the same way throughout the site. If your services include ‘Research & Development’ ensure it is expressed using ‘&’ everywhere it appears, always with capitalisation, and if you display times and dates be sure to express them the same way throughout. This is a cornerstone of well-crafted, easily scannable copy.
Check your details.
I’m quite serious about this. Phone all phone numbers you have been supplied. Do they work? If you’re building a site for The Royal Albert Hall, do they answer? And are they aware you are shortly going to launch a site, with their number on it, inviting thousands of people to call for more information? These are crucial checks to ensure that the entire marketing process, right down to (phone) calls to action are prepared for the site going live. Check email addresses you have been supplied and make sure they work and are being received by someone. Oh, and check they are not still pointing at you for testing – make sure the clients email address is specified when the site goes live.
Check through any ‘hidden’ copy on site.
Look at ALT text and ensure it is descriptive and not just ‘XXX’ – read through any text within Javascript functions, failure or alert messages, and also and remove anything potentially embarrassing or plain unnecessary.
Make sure you are not going live with any test copy on your site.
Check for instances of ‘For more information call XXXX,’ or worse still, ‘At ACME and Co we pride ourselves on [Dave, has the client approved the mission statement yet]‘ You get the picture.
SEO
Check your keywords.
Ensure you have your meta description in place, and that any keywords are suitable for the site. Do the keywords appear in your site copy where appropriate? Turn off your style sheets and read your site as a search engine will, and check your keywords are written in HTML and not all contained within images.
Check your titles.
Do you pages have relevant and descriptive title tags, and are your page names suitably descriptive.
Check your URL structure
Google has taken considerable steps within Webmaster Tools to reward site owners for declaring, and being consistent about canonical URL’s. That is to declare to Google which URL structure you will maintain on your site, to avoid the duplicate content penalty. So if you choose example.com/products over www.example.com/products, then check to ensure the links within your pages follow this convention.
Check you have a sitemap.
Generate an XML sitemap and submit it to Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Gsite Crawler is a great tool to help create these automatically for you.
Set up analytics on your site and schedule any weekly reports that might need sending to your clients, and also set up any statistical alerts you might need to notify you of any spikes in traffic that might signify malicious activity. Stats packages worth your attention are listed in the URL’s below.
Standards and Validation
Clearly this is not something that should be left until the last few days prior to launch. But you should always make one final sweep through your content to check for validation issues. You should be checking your HTML, CSS, Accessibility and your Javascript. Quite often you can encounter validation issues late in the project with the addition of javascripts from a third party if a client has reporting software they wish to use, or if you are carrying advertising or inviting referrals from an affiliate network. As these are so often just thrown in to the code at the last minute it is vital to check that they don’t interfere with functions that were (up until then) working just fine. The Developer Toolbar for Firefox is a great time saver when it comes to validating your HTML and CSS, with the WAVE toolbar being similarly indispensable for checking against WCAG guidelines. That said there is no substitute for a good working knowledge of the WCAG guidelines as so much of them cannot be checked against by a plug-in, and requires common sense and a keen eye to avoid problems.
Site Functions
Does everything work?
Again, this should have been tested long before now, but don’t go live without checking it. Often you will have moved a site from a development server to a production server in the run up to putting it live, and that may have upset your file structure. Maybe you have an API which relies on the address of a development server to work and will need altering if it is to work at the live address.
Check your search facility
Check your search facility if you have one and make sure that is pulling in results. Also check for dead links across the site with something like Xenu’s Link Checker.
Check all browser variations
Check all browser variations that you promised to support, all screen resolutions and ensure that your site degrades gracefully without the support of Javascript and Flash. Your site should be easily interpreted by a screen reader with CSS switched off, and this can be checked by downloading a text only browser such as Lynx for the PC.
Think about common web conventions and whether your site breaks them. Are all your links consistently styled? If all links are underlined, check that no text is underlined for presentational reasons that people might mistake for a link.
Don’t forget to set up a print style for your site.
It is stunning quite how often this ignored. Insert this line into your <head> tags and create your print style sheet.
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="print.css" media="print" />
Security
Ensure you have your site files backed up, but assuming that this is something you do as a matter of course, ensure that you are backing up any databases on the website that might contain important customer data. There are services and applications who can automate this for you such as Site-Vault and Iron Mountain, providing you with the peace of mind that only a reliable backup can bring.
Check your form fields against SQL injections, and test any anti-spam functions you have in place to prevent spam bots.
Protect any sensitive pages
Protect any sensitive pages or folders from being indexed on search engines by putting in place robots.txt files and by excluding them from within Webmaster Tools / Bing / Yahoo Site Explorer and also consider whether you need to use an htaccess file to disable folder view within directories.
Performance
Increasingly this is becoming more an issue. With rumours of Google rewarding faster sites with better rankings it is crucial that your pages load as swiftly as possible.
Safari 4 has a great tool within its developer menu which checks the speed of your pages downloading, and highlights which elements take the longest and therefore might need attention.
Check your image optimisation with a tool like Smushit.
Check you have caching enabled if appropriate.
If possible consider the use of image sprites to reduce http requests to your site. SpriteMe.org offers simple online solution that might get you started.
Minify your Javascript and CSS files using a tool such as YUI or YSlow from Yahoo to ensure your code is delivered as swiftly as possible. Firefox add-ons such as Dust Me Selectors can help to remove unused selectors from style sheets, helping to keep file sizes down.
Legal
Those lawyers get everywhere. Links to legal policies are so often added to a footer element on a website and then given no further thought until moments before go live.
Copyright
Check that this is set to automatically refresh from the time stamp on the server, and that the copyright owner stated is correct. It won’t always be the client or brand who should be credited.
Terms and Conditions
If your site has a promotional element or takes payment then you will need to make available t’s and c’s. Always consult either the Institute of Sales Promotion or a lawyer for the best advice on these, or if they are supplied to you then make sure they have been checked.
Privacy Policies
If you use cookies, capture data, or distribute data, then you need one. The best advice is always to be honest, and to state clearly what you collect data for, how it is stored, and to whom might it be passed. So if you this might be you then be sure you have a clear statement explaining all of this, or least provide details of how you can be contacted for further information.
Company Registered Information
If you are a registered company then you must display on your website the registered company name, number, and address. Simple, but so often forgotten about. For more information visit either Companies House or Business Link online for more information.
Add icons and error pages
Add your favicon.
And while you’re at it, do you need one for mobile devices such as iPhones? Add this into the <head>
<link rel="icon" type="image/x-icon" href="/favicon.ico" />
And this for an iPhone
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/favicon.png" />
Create 404 pages.
Crucial for so many reasons. If the project is a re-design then search engines will have cached links to pages that will no longer exist. Use 404 pages to present users with links to where that information is now located. Webmaster Tools provides an easy way to produce 404 pages if you aren’t an experienced developer, but ignore these at your peril.
Further reading
Smashing Magazine wrote an excellent post entitled “45 Incredibly Useful Web Design Checklists and Questionnaires” that contains many more checklists worth reading. They have other launch checklists, web standards checklists and even a checklist for improving site performance.
30 Comments
Comments are for the discussion of this post. If you have other questions / comments then post them to the forum or send me an email
Great article, will definatly be printing this off for my next launch.
Do you know of any tools or tips for doing some of these checks on a much bigger site with hundreds or thousands of pages?
Yes, great article. To check for mistakes, use spellcheck. Then read it twice. It’s not just about spelling. Most stuff on the web is simply poorly written. No rhythm. Good writing has style and cadence. That stuff is a joy to read, even if it’s a couple of hundred pages. Half a page of crap will send you to zzzzzzzzzzzz
Great list, very handy. One to bookmark.
I’d also add in an extra one: 301 redirects. If you’re doing a redesign on the same domain name, or moving from one domain to another as part of a re-design, then you absolutely must get all your redirects worked out before you go live — you don’t want to risk losing Google juice from dead pages, and it’s a massive help for visitors too, much better than serving up a 404.
You mentioned the 404 pages for cached indexed pages that no longer exist — to be honest, you shouldn’t ever have this problem if you’ve taken care to handle the redirects properly.
You have really outdone yourself this time, Mr. Boag.
Actually I haven’t. If you notice I didn’t write it. :-)
Great stuff – and a timely reminder as I have a new site that will go live this week!
Awesome checklist! There’s always something you forget until after the launch :)
Hi Damian,
Thanks! I haven’t found a reliable too yet for performing the checks above, site-wide across a large number of pages. There are some that cliam to do it, but in reality they just check the detail that only a machine can check, which is things like title tags, meta, headings, alt text and the like.
Probably a good opportunity for someone to develop something, although I imagine it would be a mammoth task!
Check. Check. Check.
And if I forget something…well that’s why they’ve invented the everlasting ‘beta’, I guess.
;)
FYI you mispellerized optimise.
Nice work – and very useful.I think I will keep it alongside me for when I start the site to ensure I that I try and do these things as I go along – do not want a last minute shock to hit me !!
- keep up the good work guys
You should mention under SEO to make sure any tracking code, like Google Analytics for example, is in place and to follow up on adding and verifying the site through Webmaster Tools and/or similar.
Wow – This is such an extensive list. You’ve really outdone yourself. Thanks for being such a great resource to the web creation community.
Great list. Short enough to be useable. Long enough to be useable. Someone should make a nice PDF version for us all to print out.
Actually there is a similar list available here in PDF format.
As I understand it, the copyright date refers to the year the content was created. So surely to have the date increment automatically (or even manually!) each year might not be the best solution, especially as we move to a more semantic way of doing things.
If the site is not going to be updated, maybe it’s just a microsite driving traffic to a bigger site for example, then the date should remain static. And if the site is to be regularly updated, the copyright notice should show a date-range.
With this in mind I always hard-code the year the site was launched and follow it by a hyphen and the current year (with a bit of logic to test if it differs from launch year, 2010-2010 just looks silly!).
If this is true-the copyright date should be the date the content was originally created-then blog post pages could have a copyright in the footer which reflects the year the item was posted.
Hence the use of a date range, eg. 2008-2010
We published “The Ultimate Website Launch Checklist” almost exactly a year ago :)
You can check it out (together with a downloadable PDF version) here:
http://www.boxuk.com/blog/the-ultimate-website-launch-checklist
Great post and a very thorough checklist. Every web developer/designer should have a list like this to review prior to site launch. Thanks for posting such high quality content!
Great list – already bookmarked it for reference! Thanks.
Awesome list. For sites that are replacing existing ones I would recommend load testing. Estimate the peak load of a site and test against that plus some headroom based on growth patterns. I missed that on a critical site once and had to pull several late nights re-coding and re-deploying on larger hardware to handle the strain and concurrency issues.
Nice post, but I was expecting to see a PDF version of this checklist as a supplement..
Invaluable! I am printing this and checking against it before I get my current project signed off!
That is a great checklist.
This is an excellent list – but as Aziz said, a PDF or doc would be great. Still, I guess you can’t be expected to do all the work!
I’d also add to check that none of the text has disappeared – in some designs it’s easy to find you have only part of the text fitted into the space available.
Excellent checklist, I’ll be using this on Friday afternoon signoff struggles!
Wow, wow, wow! Such a great article! I really feel like I’ve just learned so much! Tnx for that :)
Last February, Box UK published ‘The Ultimate Website Launch Checklist’ – very similar in content to this post but in a different list format. A PDF was also created and has been available in English and French on our website for months: http://www.boxuk.com/blog/the-ultimate-website-launch-checklist
We had great coverage of this blog item – liked to by Robert Scoble and others.
This is an excellent detailed list! Will definatley be using it.
We at loadverify have come up with a sanity check that would compliment this one!
http://blog.loadverify.com/2010/02/13/load-verifys-10-things-to-check-off-your-checklist-before-go-live-with-your-website/