The Ultimate WordPress Website Launch Checklist: Best things to Follow for Success In 2023

Ultimate WordPress Website Launch Checklist

Looking for how to launch a WordPress website?

So, you finally finished customizing your WordPress website. We’re assuming you would love to launch your brand-new website straight away! It took a lot of work, time, and effort to see a website creation process to the end. 

To get a website running smoothly, a lot of inner elements and functions must be in order. There’s a lot to remember, and one small mistake or miscalculation might spoil your website launch.

The best thing you can do before launching your website is to create a road map of all the steps involved to ensure a positive outcome and a flawless launch. We’re talking about going through a Complete Guideline for the WordPress website. 

Since there are a lot of things to go through, it can get a bit overwhelming for beginners. For your convenience, we’ve prepared a well throughout WordPress website launch step-by-step guide, that is followed by industry professionals regularly. 

Let’s get started! 

The Importance of Having a Comprehensive WordPress Website Launch Checklist 

As the saying goes, the first impression lasts forever. This is especially true for newly created websites. If you run into issues at launch, visitors might be reluctant to continue using your website. and might lose visitors for good. 

By following an ultimate guide for the WordPress website, you’ll be able to revise all the potential issues and points of failure before you launch your website online. This is particularly important for those large businesses, companies, and notable individuals who have a strong online presence. 

This somewhat explains why some WordPress website examples fail to rank on Google. If your website cannot retain initial visitors and fails to attract new ones, it is safe to say your WordPress website launch was a bust. 

But do not worry about anything. You still have time. By going through a comprehensive, expert-designed pre-launch evaluation, you can revise any flaws or potential issues that might arise at launch. 

The cost for a WordPress website may vary depending on various elements and the features and functionality requirements, but the WordPress website pre-launch checklist process is completely free of cost. 

So, you don’t need to worry about additional costs mounting up. 

Here Is the Ultimate WordPress Pre-launch Checklist  

This checklist is generalized and recommended by industry professionals. Some of the items mentioned in this pre-launch checklist might not apply to your WordPress website, depending on your preference, SEO, marketing, customization, development, etc. 

But most of the checklist items mentioned are important and you should follow through. By following this checklist, you’ll have a clear idea of what is important to you and your personal WordPress website.

And you’ll be able to create your own personalized pre-launch checklist. 

1. Setup Your WordPress Home Page

An attractive, well-optimized homepage is a must for any modern website. Everyone expects to be greeted with an informative homepage that best describes your website. 

The homepage should offer all the necessary elements to best describe what your website is about and all the navigational cues, may they be in the form of buttons, categories, drop-downs, menus, or a combination of them. 

If you’re yet to organize or customize your homepage with all the necessary elements, you can take full advantage of using ElementsReady page builder plugins.

For example, if you’re trying to launch a WordPress blog website, your homepage has to include layouts that best represent your blog posts with stylish thumbnails and typography. 

This is a key item in the pre-launch checklist that requires great attention while checking. 

2. Having an Automated Backup System in Place

This is specifically not a WordPress website launch checklist per se, but creating time-to-time up-to-date backups is generally regarded as good practice in the field of web development. 

You can think of backups as insurance for your WordPress website. If anything goes wrong during the pre-check or after launch, you can safely go back to a stable backup of your website. 

For your WordPress website, you can choose from a wide array of useful plugins that will keep track of your website’s backups and upload the backup files to the cloud on a timely basis. 

3. Removing Dummy Content

Removing Dummy Content

WordPress already has some dummy content material built in by default, including the infamous “Hello, World!” post and “Sample Page” page. Some popular hosts also overlay their own dummy content.

And since none of this content is relevant to your website, you should delete all the dummy content before going live. Examine the posts, pages, and comments sections for anything that should not be there.

4. Anti-Spam Protection 

Anti Spam Protection

Newly launched websites are often the victims of spam comments, accounting for up to 85% of all posted comments on the site. To prevent such attacks, you can utilize WordPress plugins such as the Akismet anti-spam plugin

Plugins such as this are designed with an anti-spam filter function, which eliminates the risk of spam comments on your posts.

5. Deactivate and Delete Unused Plugins

WordPress plugins are without a doubt the backbone of the open-source platform. But you should be aware of some plugins, as some may not be well-optimized and may cause slowdowns. 

If any plugins remain unused, you should consider removing them as this will lighten the load on your WordPress website. 

Another important thing to consider while talking about unused plugins is that if any plugin development team drops support for a plugin, you should consider removing it from your website as it might become a compatibility issue with future WordPress versions. 

Also, at any point, if you’ve installed and activated a plugin from an unreliable source, you should remove it straight away as the plugin might become a security risk later on. 

6. Optimize WordPress URL Structures By Setting Permalinks 

It is essential that you work on optimizing your WordPress URL structure by setting proper permalinks for each page. As they affect your SEO performance, referrals, and shared links on social media. 

The best practice is to optimize your permalinks with your ongoing SEO strategy to get the best performance out of each link. 

Another thing that needs to be taken into consideration while creating permalinks is that they need to be short, descriptive, and unique to the page they are assigned to. 

For example, let’s say you’re about to publish an SEO-focused blog post, then your permalink should be something like this – yoursite.com/blog/the-SEO-title or yoursite.com/SEO-title. 

The permalinks on your website allow you to set what works best for your website. It’s important to set the permalinks before launching.

7. Make Sure to Create a Custom 404 Page

Custom 404 pages are in place to inform the user that there was a problem with their request. Visitors may have entered the URL incorrectly, the page may be temporarily inaccessible, or the page may no longer be available. An effective 404 page will acknowledge the error and direct visitors back to the site’s homepage or a related page. 

It’s crucial to have this page since it allows you the opportunity to assist those visitors in finding what they’re looking for and keep them on your website.

8. Recheck Your Admin Email Address

It’s crucial to have a valid admin email address so you can reset your password in the event that you unintentionally lock yourself out of the WordPress dashboard, and this is also important for receiving error messages from WordPress Site Health.

9. Validate Website Loading Time

Nothing can be worse than having a slow-loading website at launch. It is highly recommended to quadruple-check your WordPress website’s load speeds and make sure that they have the best loading speed possible. 

To validate whether your WordPress website is performing well or not, you can use something like Google Pagespeed Insights. Tools like this will provide you with detailed information on your load times, on both desktop and mobile. 

10. Cross Browser Compatibility Check

Cross Browser Compatibility Check

Since there is now a diverse range of devices and applications to browse from. You should ensure that the cross-browser compatibility check is at the top of your compulsory pre-launch checklist. 

You can utilize multi-compatibility checker tools such as BrowserStack Screenshot. This tool will allow you to check the compatibility cross-browser of your website on multiple platforms and devices at once. 

11. Enable Search Engine Indexing for WordPress 

If you haven’t done this yet, you should do it immediately. It is a common practice to disable search engine indexing for WordPress while the website is under construction, but some forget to re-enable it before launching the website. 

It’s crucial to re-enable this feature before going live to avoid unintentionally preventing Google from indexing your live website. Indexing your website is a crucial step toward your website’s eventual success. 

12. Valid Your SSL Certificate 

Valid SSL Certificate

If you already didn’t know, the SSL certificate makes it possible for a web browser to establish an encrypted connection with your secured website. It resembles the process of putting a letter in an envelope and mailing it.

Valid SSL certification is vital for your website to operate at its optimal level and not run into any security concerns or hurdles. Most hosting service providers nowadays do provide valid SSL certification. 

But in case you don’t already have one, you can utilize a free SSL certification plugin for WordPress. 

13. Enable/Disable Comments on WordPress 

Comments are obviously very useful for creating an engaging WordPress website, but if your use case doesn’t specifically require comments, it is best to turn off the comment system on your website. 

For example, if you are looking to launch a blog or a news WordPress website, it is highly recommended that you have your comments turned on. This makes your website more engaging and active. 

But if you’re looking to launch a restaurant portfolio, then turning on the comment is no longer necessary, and enabling it can expose your website to spam comments.  

14. Keep Your Theme & Plugins Up to Date

It’s important that you keep your WordPress website up to date to avoid any unfortunate errors with the latest version of WordPress or WordPress page builder plugins like as Elementor or Beaver Builder. 

An upside of keeping WordPress themes updated is getting new features, fixes, and optimization with the latest versions of Elementor or WordPress. For example, the best Elementor addons for WooCommerce – ShopReady, are constantly getting major updates, new features, tools, and optimization. 

Keep an eye out for any updates to your WordPress theme as well. WordPress themes usually get updates in the form of fixes, compatibility checks for newer WordPress versions, and content updates in the form of new blocks, templates, and demos. These updates are free, so it’s better not to miss out on them. 

Outdated plugins & themes can also cause serious errors such as WordPress White Screen Of Death (WSoD).

15. Take Out the Tagline “Just Another WordPress Site.”

This tagline is inserted into your WordPress website by default. This may create some confusion as it is not relevant to your website. And most website owners who missed out on the pre-launch guide are still carrying this same tagline on their websites. 

The best thing to do is swap your WordPress website tagline for something relevant to your website and services. 

16. Using a Customized Website Icon & Favicon

A Website Icon/Favicon is the icon that gets showcased next to your website title, browser tab, bookmark, etc. If you haven’t changed your website icon/favicon yet, you should do so straight away. This doesn’t negatively impact your website, but you should change it to something that best represents your website. 

17. Replace Lorem Ipsum Dummy Content 

Before launching your brand new website, you should definitely remove/replace Lorem Ipsum’s dummy placeholder text. This may cause confusion among visitors who are not aware of what this placeholder text content might mean. 

18. Create/Test Your Forms 

If you’re planning to implement any kind of form on your WordPress website, then you should recheck if the forms work as intended. The best way to test if forms work properly on your WordPress or not is to create test forms. 

Things you need to test before going live:

Is it open to fresh form submissions?

Have you created a personalized confirmation message?

Have you set up email notifications for new submissions?

Do such notifications reach the intended email address(es)?

Is your form compatible with popup? 

19. Create a 301 redirect link 

The 301 redirect link allows you to “redirect” website visitors to a different webpage automatically. Assume you modify a post/page’s URL from yoursite.com/old-title to yoursite.com/new-title. With a 301 redirect, you may automatically redirect visitors to yoursite.com/old-title to yoursite.com/new-title without the visitor being required to type/click on a link manually. 

20. Configure Your Preferred SEO Plugin

SEO Plugins such as Yoast SEO plugin, are excellent tools that allow users to get a better understanding of their website’s current SEO potential and help them navigate issues. Plugins like Yoast SEO will feature a dashboard with useful SEO resources and a mark from where the overall SEO score can be improved. 

21. Image Optimization 

The more images you upload to your website, the heavier your website becomes. To prevent this, it is advisable to optimize images before uploading them online. You can utilize programs such as Imagify or Smush to bulk-optimize images for your website. 

You should also check for image alt text. If your image is missing alt text, you should add new ones immediately. 

Both SEO and accessibility benefit from this. Use a plugin like an Image SEO Optimizer to automatically fill out your many empty alt tags.

To Wrap It Up, 

There are numerous minor details that need to be taken into consideration while building a WordPress site (depending on the topic, purpose, and genre). It can be a challenging task to make sure that everything works as intended and is functional. 

The best way of making sure that nothing goes wrong on your website after launch is to create and follow a website pre-launch checklist.

This will make sure that you have considered every important/minor detail before you launch your website. 

By following this pre-launch checklist that we’ve prepared, you’ll be able to make sure that everything is in place before the launch and your website is ready to greet your visitors. 

In the end, if you found this short recommendation on a pre-launch checklist, do consider sharing it with someone who is looking to launch their own website.

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