You pour your heart and soul into web design and development with the hope that it will enable you to reach your goals of gaining visibility, better lead generation, higher conversions and ultimately, growth. The last thing you want is that all the time, energy, efforts and money should go wasted, which is why you must test, test, test and test your website before it goes live to ensure that its functionality, performance, usability, and security are fool-proof and strong.
Here is a checklist to follow before your website goes live
Compatibility and performance across browsers: You want your website to reach the maximum possible target audience. For this, it is crucial that your website and its pages are compatible across browsers (Chrome, IE, Firefox, Safari, UC, etc.) and work seamlessly with latest versions of these.
Ensure all URLs are live and functional: Web design and development often happens in staging platforms and when it is shifted to the live stage, all the URLs are changed, and this may create impediments to the website’s functionality. It is essential to check and ensure that all URLs are live and function properly. Your logo must take the user to the homepage and external links must take them to the specific websites and pages instead of an error page.
Functionality testing: Ensure that your website is functional and able to give you the desired outcomes. For instance, the carts and payment gateways of e-commerce websites must function securely and be frictionless while informational websites must contain relevant content, inputs and forms.
Titles and meta description: The title of the webpage qualifies the content type and makes it discoverable on search engines while meta descriptions tell users what content to expect on the given page when it appears in search results. So, it is vital to check the titles and meta descriptions are unique, clear and well-thought as these impact the site’s search ranking. Also, ensure that there aren’t any duplicate title tags or meta descriptions.
Is your website mobile friendly? With so many users accessing websites and web content through their mobile and smart devices, it is indispensable that your website is mobile-friendly.
Image optimization for better speed: Users of today demand speed and if your website is going to take longer to load, their UX will deteriorate along with your website’s search ranking and user traffic. The causative factors in most cases of slow websites areheavy and uncompressed images. So, ensure all images are compressed and light.
Ensure website security with SSL certificate: SSL Certificates are an indication of data being encrypted and security of your website and evokes confidence and trust among users. Having an SSL certificate will also boost your website’s search ranking.
HTML sitemap: This enables crawler programs to better understand the structure of your website and results in its better indexing. So, ensure that your site’s HTML sitemap is properly configured.
Check for copyright issues: Ensure that all your content is free of copyright issues to infuse credibility to your website and content. For textual content, anti-plagiarise everything and for visual content(images, infographics, etc.), either acquire from legal online image selling stores/ communities or design it yourself/through your in-house design team.
404-Error handling page: From an SEO perspective, mistyped URLs must either be redirected to a 404-error handling page or your homepage.
It is very easy to get intimated by the above checklist and to think that web design and development is daunting. Well, fret not. You have digital marketing firms like Evolve Media Solutions that provide budget-friendly, customizable services in web design in India to whom you can outsource the entire process of web design and development or specific steps and elevate your website and its reach, improve your lead conversions and ultimately achieve business growth and success.
