As an internet company, Strikingly empowers individuals and brands by providing an easy to use platform for building beautiful and unique websites. We’ve taken the technical work off your hands so you can focus on creating content and designing your website.
After spending a significant amount of time planning, designing and building your website, you’re now ready to launch - well, almost. There are just a few more items on your website checklist to tick off before your site goes live. Make sure to go through this list thoroughly to prevent the chance of mishaps.
1. Check for typos
Don’t make the mistake of publishing a website full of typographical errors. The digital world is full of grammar nazis. Proofread your text content several times over. Watch out for dummy text or placeholders that were not replaced with actual copy. Your content should be readable and clear.
2. Contact page should be updated
The last thing that you need is to get your website up and not leave a way for your target customers to contact you. Your contact details should be displayed prominently on your website. Test the phone numbers and email addresses to make sure that you’re able to receive messages properly. If you have a physical office, a map to this address will be good to have as well.
3. Test for usability
The next item on your website launch checklist is usability. It’s important to test all the features and functional aspects of your website and make sure that they are working properly. Test all links and buttons. Images should be optimized. If your site is designed to accept payments or process sales transactions, test every step of the purchase process including shopping cart functions, sign-ups and links.
4. Navigation should work properly
Visitors should be able to find their way around your website. Move through the different areas on your website like a user would and identify areas where they can potentially get stuck.
5. Your website should be mobile friendly
Testing for mobile-friendliness is another important item on your web site checklist because it also affects the overall user experience. With Google’s mobile-first indexing, it has become more important than ever to ensure that your website renders well on mobile devices. Content should look consistent and easy to read through smaller screens, navigation just as easy and the buttons spaced out appropriately.
Strikingly’s website templates are already designed for mobile devices so you don’t have to worry about adding lines of code to the site’s stylesheet for it to adapt to smaller screens. We still recommend that you test your site out just to make sure.
6. Correct spelling of URLs
If you’re working from a staging area or a staging site, it’s important to ensure that the URLs remain consistent with the live version of your site.
7. Call to action
Your website should also have clear call to action buttons. If you have a multi-page website, every page should have a specific CTA based on its individual objective. Make sure all buttons work as they should before you launch.
8. Proofread site metadata for SEO
Strikingly has an integrated SEO tool that lets you check your site’s on-page SEO factors to make sure that you have an updated site metadata. Your page title, meta description and image alt tags should be optimized for the keywords you want to rank for.
9. Social media integration
Your website should work together with your social media pages to create a cohesive online presence for your brand. Make sure you have all relevant social pages up on your website before you launch. It’s also a good idea to test the social share functionality and social streams if you have those enabled on the site.
10. Site security
Adding SSL to your website is important not just to keep users at ease when transacting or sharing information with your site but also for SEO. You can enable SSL on your Strikingly website easily without purchasing additional security certificates from a third-party website.
