The long-awaited time has finally arrived: the uploading of a website.
It is a real pleasure to see how the fruit of weeks or months of work takes shape. At Reinicia we propose a list of tasks and actions that should not be forgotten when uploading a website.
1. Testing of all web functionality
Test, test and test. It is inevitable that incidents will appear once a website is uploaded, but the more tests are done in development and the more different the profiles of the people who perform them, the better, because the fewer the number of incidents “a posteriori”. Of course, it is very important to centralize the documentation of the errors. With a document in Google Sheets for example.
At Reinicia, in addition to all the tests we do before uploading the web, once in Production, we give a period of 15 calendar days of guarantee to correct these incidences that arise and that, in some cases, will be the visitors themselves who communicate them to us.
2. Review in all browsers and on all devices
All these tests must be done with the main browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera and IE) and on all devices that may have different resolutions on our website. In our case, we focus on checking with the last two versions of the browsers and for the mobile devices in the most used by the Client’s web users.
3. Optimize web performance
We deactivate all the debugging tools we have used in development, minimize the html files, optimize the images, activate CDN services if possible, and finally run our web site through the PageSpeed Insights Google PageSpeed Insights.
4. Review of all links on the website
It may be implied, but does the logo link lead to the front page of the site? And are the other links working properly?
5. Validation of the forms
It is essential to validate all forms on our website such as user registrations, contacts and order forms: autoresponders, required fields, integration with other commercial platforms, etc.
6. W3C Validation
It is advisable to pass our pages through the validator of the W3C. This will help us to detect common errors in our code: wrongly closed tags, markup errors, etc. However, it is not worth getting obsessed with these reports, because sometimes we do NOT use pure technologies in our web and for different reasons the validator is NOT able to recognize it and will give us warnings.
7. Activate Google Analytics
We must not forget that in general, any website is born with clear business objectives and everything we do should be focused on achieving them. Therefore, it is useless to have a website if we do not know who goes through it, what they do on it and if they generate business for us in any way, either directly [purchase of products or services] or indirectly [subscription to the Newsletter]. It doesn’t matter if it is a mere showcase of products and/or services or an online megastore where hundreds of transactions are made daily, if we don’t activate a program such as Google Analytics to monitor performance, we will not be doing any better than when we were distributing unwanted advertising through mailboxes.
8. Sitemap (in xml format and in web format)
We can wait for the search engines to crawl our site by following the different links or we can take the initiative and upload the sitemaps.xml to the different search engines to suggest them the pages that contain our brand new site. The excellent YOAST plugin will help us in this task.
It is also necessary to create a sitemap in HTML format. Again, the active Wordpress community offers us a plugin suitable for creating sitemaps automatically.
9. Have we activated microdata?
If we want to launch a website with a gear later on, we should implement microdata, at least in the elements The most relevant of the same as breadcrumbs, contact page, service and product sheets, etc.. In addition we must not forget to pass the pages through the Google microdata validator.
For those of you who don’t know, microdata are special semantic tags that we insert in the code of the page and that make it easier for search engines to know what kind of information they are reading: product/service sheets, recipes, videos, locations, etc.
10. Web backup
Forgetting to make a backup of a website can be a nightmare in which we do not want to wake up. Some hostings include it among their services, but it is important to know if our hosting includes it by default and if not, to do it ourselves periodically.
11. 301 redirection of the old website
It is classic to upload a new website, change the URLs and forget what was there before. So what about those links to our obsolete URLs? This problem is greater the longer the domain has been in existence and the better known the company is. Not only will we lose visits, but the search engines could penalize us, so we will have to be very careful so that no old URL is left without redirecting to new URLs in case of disappearance.
12. Titles and meta descriptions
Nowadays, most of the people who work in web design and development and on-line marketing know what this information that appears in the code of EVERY page of the web is for. It is essential to check that each page has a Title and a unique Meta Description and that it is related to the content to which it belongs. It will be a small step to make sure you have a good base for the positioning in the search engines.
13. RSS Link
If we are launching a blog or a magazine, checking that the RSS links are working properly is of vital importance. An active RSS will allow our visitors to receive all the updates of our website automatically.
14. Page 404
It is important to prepare it personalized and of course, give options to users to find what they are looking for, showing for example a search engine or the most visited services, products and / or news of our website.
15. Favicon
We avoid leaving the default icons of our CMS and customize the favicon with the logo of our new website.
We use this code in the header of all pages (in .ico, .png and .gif formats):
<link rel="icon" href="https://[path]/favicon.gif" type="image/gif" />
<link rel="icon" href="https://[percorso]/favicon.png" type="image/png" />
and if we want to be even more detailed, we also put a dedicated favicon for iPhone and iPad:
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/favicon-iphone.png" / >
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/favicon-ipad.png" / >
16. WordPress Security
Last but not least, we must not underestimate the security issue. If we are working with WordPress we have to be aware that we are using one of the platforms most threatened by cyber attacks. At Agencia Reinicia we recommend you the Sucuri plugin that can help you analyze and make your website more secure. We also rely on the ASPL team to constantly monitor our websites.
Although we are sure that many of the proposed actions are already being carried out, we hope that we have given you some advice or guidelines that you have not yet followed. Above all, we hope that they will help you to get your web projects off to a better start.
