Redesigning your website is an exciting, yet complex undertaking. There are many ways to screw it up, that's why making a website redesign project plan is especially important. From development to copy to marketing to SEO, it's important to cover all of your bases when it's time to launch your website redesign.
We hope this website redesign checklist eliminates some of your pain, we know it has for us! Feel free to share it with a friend or colleague who is taking on a website redesign project.
Review Copy and SEO for Website Launch
1. Copy-editing - we cannot stress this enough!
Check your spelling and grammar, but make sure that you have an editor, friend or colleague look over the website with fresh eyes. It’s a known fact that when you read things multiple times, you tend to skip over words you “think” are there. If you don’t have someone to check it, put the copy in a tool like Grammarly or read the text out loud.
2. Page titles and meta descriptions
Your page title and description are especially important for search engine optimization. This tells Google what page you have on your site, what it means, and how would a user search for this page online. If you don’t have this critical piece, you’re missing the number #1 thing that Google looks at to put you in search engine results. Make sure to have titles of 55 characters or less and don’t duplicate page titles. Be specific!
3. Image ALT text
Alt text is another way that Google reads what is on your website. Why is it important? If you want to reinforce showing up in search engine results, always make sure that you have ALT text. Second, ALT text isn’t just important for SEO, but it also improves the accessibility standards of your website. It tells disabled users on your site what the image is since they can’t see it.
4. Don’t forget legal pages
Privacy policy and terms and conditions pages are often overlooked but can assist in your viability when doing paid advertising. Platforms like Facebook Ads often check your website to ensure that you have these pages. New data collection and compliance laws also require you to disclose that a person’s data may be collected when visiting your website. Your privacy policy pages can be used to showcase this information and protect your business for the future.
Take the checklist with you:
Inbound Marketing and Email
1. Email hosting
Did you recently change email providers? We have many clients who move from one-off providers like MailChimp or Constant Contact to a tool like HubSpot. This process can be quite tedious so don’t underestimate it.
Essentially, you’re moving all of your data to a new platform. You don’t want to lose it! At the same time, migrating your emails also gives you the opportunity to update contacts, properties, and sales information to make your workflow more efficient.
2. Lead capture
Are your contacts being entered into your CRM after filling out a form? Do you have quality CTAs with UTM codes set up to filter traffic? When marketing your online business, collecting information about your target market and customers is extremely valuable. Once this information is collected you can use it for future marketing campaigns such as retargeting or social advertising.
3. Internal linking
If Google sees that new users are coming to your website and finding the content useful, meaning they are diving into deep pages of your site, they will see you as more authoritative. Make sure to link articles, content, and offers on your website so that the user stays on your site for longer and is more likely to engage and become a qualified lead.
Quality Assurance and Usability Testing
I’d like to first point out that quality assurance is often the most undervalued part of the process, but quite honestly, one of the MOST IMPORTANT parts. While your website is hopefully better than it was regarding messaging and user flow, if it doesn’t work correctly, users will get frustrated and leave your website indefinitely.
On the other hand, there’s a reason why Aristotle said, “Well begun is half done.” If you never get your website out there, then you’re missing out on business opportunities.
1. Test across multiple browsers and multiple screen sizes
Safari, Chrome, Firefox - test what your website looks like on all of these browsers for each screen size: desktop, iPad, and iPhone (Apple and Android). You might be thinking, “Well that’s all fine and dandy, but what should you look out for?” Great question. When you’re testing your website you want to pay attention to all of these items:
- Double-check links and buttons
- Make sure text is showing up
- Make sure that boxes, margins, and padding are the correct sizes
- Make sure your forms are working
- Ensure that images are all rendering correctly
- Double-check that your paragraph font, headings, and lists are showing up
- Play videos
Normally, you would have a QA team that does this process for you. If you're doing your website redesign in-house, use tools like W3 Link Checker or Xenu tool. For testing responsive, you can use Google’s tool, Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test for testing.
2. Do speed testing
You want to ensure that your website is loading as fast as possible. If it’s not, you need to be able to determine what is slowing it down. Tools like Google’s
can help you analyze the different factors that can be weighing down your page speed for both mobile and desktop. This can include images, third-party codes, and HTTP requests.
DID YOU KNOW: 39% of people will stop engaging with a website if images won’t load or take too long to load.
3. Test forms
Manually test every form on your site to make sure it is functioning as planned. Ensure form notifications are being sent and received by multiple members of your team. This is also a good time to check the copy on follow-up emails, thank you pages, and form confirmations.
4. Favicon
Test to see that your Favicon is showing in the browser.
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5. Check your 404 pages
Type in a non-existent page URL on your site to get a 404 error page. Ideally, you’ll want to use a custom page for this that has an error message that’s better than the default server error.
6. Check your 301 redirects
If you had to create a new URL structure, test a few key pages from your old site URL structure to make sure they are redirecting as expected.
7. Test social links
Test all of your social icons to make sure they are taking people where you want them to go. If you have a social feed embedded on your website, click through to make sure it is linking properly. Also, try sharing articles to your social media accounts to ensure previews are enticing if someone shares your webpage or article.
Website Tracking & Technical Launch Items
1. Website tracking codes
We recommend adding all channels to ensure that you have all of your bases are covered. Especially if you plan to run ads across different channels like AdWords, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn, or retargeting, you'll want to make sure to install and test your tracking codes properly. However, Google Analytics is your number one priority here - the other channels aren’t required for your website redesign launch.
2. Make sure to redirect!
A redirect tells Google where the location of your new website page is. If you deleted or are deleting website pages from your old website, you'll want to make sure to point the old page to the new page (or your home page if there's no equivalent to the page you are deleting). Once you’ve added these redirects in, be sure to test to ensure they were added correctly and are working properly.
3. Check your XML sitemap
If you are using a tool like the WordPress SEO plugin from Yoast, you’ll get your site map URL from the plugin. If not, you can use a free tool like this XML sitemap generator. Or if your site is hosted on HubSpot, they offer a quick sitemap generator under Settings. This sitemap should be submitted to notify search engines that these new website pages should be crawled.
4. Check your robots.txt file
Your robots.txt file works hand-in-hand with your sitemap. This file is created to signify to the search engines which pages to crawl and which pages to omit, making sure that Google can crawl your website efficiently. For more information, read Google's post on the subject.
5. Check NAP with Schema
Verify that your business information is correctly formatted in the Schema code. You can learn more at schema.org. Schema markup can also be used to markup specific text for rich snippets and organic search results. More information on this can be found using Google’s developer documentation.
6. WordPress Plugin Audit
If you’re using a platform like WordPress, make sure that all of your plugins are working, updated, and collecting data. Plugins can also slow your site speed down if too many are used. Troubleshooting this issue if this is a problem you are experiencing can help to improve your usability for future users.
7. Confirm your SSL
Standing for Secure Sockets Layer, an SSL is known as the padlock at the beginning of your URL bar in your browser. SSL certificates are small data files that cryptographically establish an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. This link ensures that all data passed between the web server and browser remain private.
An SSL is an industry-standard today and should be maintained to help protect your users and their information. You can use this tool to double-check any potential issues.
8. Point Your DNS
After thorough QA testing, it’s time to point your DNS to the new hosting Nameservers. This means it's time to launch your website redesign!
9. Lastly, submit your site to directories
Yahoo Directory, DMOZ, Business.com, JoeAnt, Best of the Web, Google, Bing. Updating your information with local directories will ensure your customers have no trouble finding your business online and can help to improve your local SEO efforts.
Launch your Website Redesign
We hope you can use this website redesign launch checklist for your new website launch!
Did we miss something? Reach out to us via email and let us know. Remember, it doesn't stop at launch. There is a whole checklist of activities that you'll need to ensure once you go live. (Including testing again!).
At LAIRE, we specialize in helping companies design/redesign their websites for optimal lead generation and inbound marketing. Our websites are catered for optimal SEO and digital marketing growth. Schedule a 20-minute marketing assessment to learn how we can help you redesign your website and grow your business!
*Editors note: This blog post was originally posted on February 17th, 2019 and has been recently updated in 2022.
