8. Launch

Man the stations, as we press the big red button. As our previous testing will have found the vast majority of discrepancies in browsers and devices, this testing has saved us from a lot of headaches. A website relaunch can cause issues, but we use a few tools to make it as painless as possible.

ScreamingFrog

One main thing to check is every link on the site. On a large site to do this manually would take quite a bit of time. That sounds like a repeatable computer thing to do, you may say. There is software that can handle this, and one of the options is ScreamingFrog. It's free up to 500 pages, so unless a large site then that should be enough quota to cover you.

Open the tool and run it on your website, even if you know the site very well, it can prompt you to links that weren't working as expected.

If you are swapping over to a completely new and different platform, it's a good idea to leave the old hosting environment for a month or so. Quality Web design in Aberdeen has taught us this trick over time. It may be that you need some feature or file from the older site. This is a very common happening and it saves a lot of hassle if you can easily access files and features like this. Even if the site isn't directly accessible online, have a full backup of the old site and all files and databases, just in case you need something.

404 pages

If you are on a new platform, make sure that all previous page addresses are considered. It may be a case that there is content that you don't need, and it's perfectly ok to have a “This page cannot be found” technically known as a 404 page. As businesses develop, they lose some and add some different products or services over time. If you no longer sell product X, a 404 page is adequate here. If there is a product or service similar, then you should use a 301 redirect for these. Even if there is a chance that they visit or could buy a similar product, then a 301 is better than a 404 page. We normally put a search box on the 404 page, rather than a dead end for the visitor.

Google Search Console

Sign up for Google Search Console and make sure you can access your site. It's a tremendous free offering from Google and has sorts of useful features which help you spot a lot of wrongdoings post-launch. The indexing is an important part, you want to make sure there that all pages are indexed that should be in the Google retrieval system.

If you are swapping over to a new url, then submitting the site through Google Search Consoles new site option can help a lot. It speeds up the process considerably. You can also submit a new site map through the admin to tell them about all your pages to get index and then ranked on Google.

There is more to launching a site than the above, but the these 2 tools and a good bit of experience can make for trouble free site launches.