7 Must-Take Steps Before Launching Your Website

7 Must-Take Steps Before Launching Your Website

Everyone wants to launch a website, but they never think of the steps they should be taking prior to launching.  Sure, a website is an idea to get something from your head to a digital space online, but if you don't do a few things prior, you will not be the happy website owner like how you see everyone else.  Just like any business, you need to plan everything a few times before you execute it, and it's no different when it comes to launching a website.  The main different between a person launching a website for their business compared to someone that launches multiple websites in different niches as a business, is the fact that you can screw up when launching a bunch of website but you don't want to if you're just launching a single one that your business is relying on.

Messing up your website launch isn't nearly as bad as messing it up and not realizing it for months, or years, because you don't know how successful your website could have actually been if you did it right from the beginning.  This is why you need to know what you're going to be doing, before you actually do it, so you don't mess anything up and possibly have it go unnoticed for months or years.  This discussion will be covering a few things you need to focus on prior to launching your website, and those things are:


Get the right domain
This may be an obvious step, since you need a domain for your website, but you'd be amazed at what some people purchase and think it's going to be amazing for their website.  Your domain needs to be short and sweet, but also easy to remember at the same time, if you want people to return without having to search for you on Google. 

Think about it, if your competitor wanted to, they could run a PPC campaign and get ranked above you in the search results for your own business name.  Businesses aren't restricted to what they can target in PPC campaigns as long as they can afford each client that comes through.  If your own business doesn't have hundreds of other advertisers targeting it, the PPC cost will be next to nothing and your competitors will eventually figure this out.  If your domain is easy to remember, people will type it directly into the address bar and bypass any Google searches that your competitors could be trying to filter your traffic from

You also need to say your domain out loud and not just in your head.  If it sounds fine in your head, it might not sound right when you say it out loud.  A great way to avoid having your domain not sound funny or be difficult to say is to not have the ending sound of the first word match the beginning sound of the second.  If you have multiple words within your domain, the beginning of each word needs to sound different than the end of the word that it's touching.

Examples:

1. blushshoe.com
2. itchchange.com

Say these out loud and realize why they aren't the best for your new website.  You have to pause between the words, and that's never a good thing


Pick the perfect hosting
Hosting goes a long way when you own a website even though you can't see it working.  A host like NameCheap is always a good bet if you don't have a preferred company to host your website.  You'll need to focus on website speed and up-time, then choose your perfect hosting plan for your needs.  If you have plans to publish a lot of images or videos, you'll likely need a bigger hosting plan since those will both take up more bandwidth due to loading more things than a website loaded with just text would.

Usually you won't need more than a $5 or $10 per month hosting plan, but if you have big plans and a decent budget, you can always opt for a dedicated hosting plan that will put you on your own server and give you much more space for videos, images, and anything else you can think of


Choose the right Designer or Theme
If you don't have the skills to code and program the website by yourself, you will need to think of bringing someone else on board to do it.  You will need to figure out if you want to get everything custom coded by a professional designer or if you want to purchase a theme built by a professional designer that sells to the masses.

If you go with a designer to make something custom, you will always be paying much more because the website will need to be coded from scratch.  It will take much longer to do since there will be a lot of testing and editing in order to get everything exactly how you want it.

If you go with a WordPress theme, you will be able to get your website up and running within a week after you add in your own edits through a drag and drop builder that most premium themes come with.  A lot of people will go with WordPress because the user dashboard is much more convenient than most custom coded ones, the themes are usually under $100 and that's a fully designed website, and it takes much less time to launch a full website than custom coding would take to get everything done.

Figure out if you want to spend a lot of money and time on a custom coded website that no one will have or if you don't mind purchasing a theme that others might have, but will take a lot less time to get live.


Use a placeholder page
You will always want to use a placeholder type of homepage so people know you're working on your new website, but you want them to know you're still there.  A lot of businesses will just launch their new design, without testing anything, and they will edit it as they go.  This just shows you were unprepared for what was to come and launched early, which your visitors might not enjoy. 

Placeholder pages come in many shapes and designs, so be sure to pick the one that suites you best.  If you have a specific date and time you want to launch, you can even use a placeholder page that has a countdown timer.  These are pretty awesome when launching something that you're hyping up and collecting emails for, because people will regularly come back to check just in case they might have missed or deleted a notification email


Set up everything prior to launch
Like I mentioned above, you need to make sure everything is set up and ready to work right away before you launch.  This means you need to keep your placeholder page up until you're 1,000% sure everything is in working order.  You don't have to add 100 new pages of content before you launch, but the more content you have, the more people will obviously be able to read when the do get to your website. 

You should definitely focus on all your scripts working without crashing a page, make sure all your pages are optimized for the search engines, make sure your email newsletter is set up and working perfect, make sure your website is loading properly, and make sure it's responsive.  If you can do that, you'll have a better launch than most of your competitors lol



In conclusion
Launching a website isn't the most difficult thing to do, you just have to be patient and also keep working to get everything done.  You need to make sure people can remember your domain name and can just type it into the address bar so they can bypass any search engines where your competitors might be trying to snipe your sales.  You will need to decide what type of design you want, which hosting plan is best for you, what type of placeholder page you want to show, and definitely be sure that everything works perfectly before you launch.  In the end, you will have a perfect website ready for anyone to come visit and sign up or make a purchase


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Thanks!

Razzy