There’s a lot of work that goes into launching a website. If you’ve already done a lot of the labor—nice job! But even if it seems like you’re crossing the finish line, take a step back. There might be some considerations that you’ve overlooked during the process.
Here are a few things to test before launching a new site.
Does Your Site Look Good on Mobile Devices?
Around 60 percent of online searches in the United States happen on a mobile device. This is a trend that doesn’t appear to be slowing anytime in the near future. The onus is on you to push out a website that is accessible and readable via mobile. In fact, Google recently changed its search algorithm to prefer sites that render well on mobile.
Fortunately, this won’t take an obscene amount of work on your end. The best web hosting platforms will offer mobile responsiveness or mobile compatibility as a standard feature. Regardless, you need to ensure that your site looks good on both phones and tablets before you decide to open it up to the public.
Is Analytics Doing Its Job?
Analytics adds a helpful element to any website. Analytics shows you how people are engaging with your content. Looking at this information will allow you to fine tune your process in order to make site visitors happier. The vast majority of visitors jumping from your home page to your product section? Consider integrating the two pages to ensure a more streamlined user experience.
Some web platforms offer users a variety of built-in analytics tools. There are also a lot of external analytics programs out there if you want to get really detailed. For most people, the standard toolkit will be enough to examine user engagement over time.
Have You Thought About SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a way for individuals and organizations to increase their chances of being found online. Not every web search is specific. How often do you know exactly what you’re looking for when you type something into Google? It doesn’t matter what your site does, it can benefit from SEO.
Keywords are a great starting point. You can test keyword viability buy running them through a variety of free tools. Using strong keywords on your site will boost your organic search viability in search engines. You’ll want to place these keywords in a variety of places, such as in body text, and in image and site metadata. Finally, you should see what happens when you search for your site. If it’s hard to find, you’ll want to make some changes.
Is Your Site Fast Enough?
People who use the Internet frequently know that few things are more obnoxious than a slow site. In fact, this is something that many people won’t tolerate at all. About 40 percent of people abandon websites that take longer than three seconds to load. Three seconds isn’t a very long time. Yet, in today’s world where everything happens instantly, people simply don’t want to wait that long for a webpage. You’re going to end up losing a lot of business if your website has a slow load time. Use a free speed test site to ensure everything is running smoothly before you launch.
Are Your Images Good to Go?
Not many people want to read through endless seas of text when visiting a website. Images are a great way to break up text with a bit of flavor. But you need to make sure photos and graphics are working correctly before you welcome visitors to your website. How can images not work correctly? First, you should see how they appear on the page. Are they aligned in a way that looks good? Be honest with yourself. There’s no benefit to telling yourself something that isn’t true since it’s your visitors that will suffer.
Photos and graphics also play a role in determining site speed. These are often data-heavy files; so they can take a while to load. To remedy this, you can compress images for faster load times.
Don’t rush your site launch. You can always make it private again if something’s off, but that won’t bode well for your image or business. Just take a bit of extra time to check these things before you launch your site.