Before you launch your company website there are 9 major considerations you want to make sure you feel 100% confident about before you take that step. It’s always a better idea to launch a website knowing that you have paid attention to these details. Think of this like a checklist to make sure you are on target before your website goes live—if you are ready and know you have a good understanding of all 10 things on this list, then you are ready to launch your site.

  1. Understand your audience.

Before you launch your website, you want to be sure that you understand who your audience is. One way to do this is by establishing your social media platforms first (see #4 on this list), but another way is to critically think about who your potential customers will be based on the products and services you offer. Once you understand this, it is going to be a lot easier to choose imagery, think about site design, and design the type of content that is going to be relevant to your visitors.

  • Do you know your audience well enough to feel confident in your design?

  1. Read your content thoroughly.

This should be obvious, but I cannot tell you how many websites (old and new) do not have content that has been edited and proofread. Before you even think about going live, absolutely proof your content, and this goes for any content you might develop and add after the site goes live. If you were the one to write and develop most of the content, you will want to think about having someone else look over the content for you.

  • Is your content looking pristine and ready to go live?

  1. Subscribe to your brand’s email list.

This tip isn’t as obvious. Many times when a business is the one developing the content for email marketing, they do not think about subscribing to it themselves, but this has a lot of benefits. For one, you can get the user experience so you can judge how you feel about the frequency and content of emails. Secondly, you can make sure that images and content are appearing correctly on the receiving end. Before you launch your site and begin to use the associated email marketing strategies for your leads, definitely subscribe to your own list!

  • Have you developed an email list and put yourself on it?

  1. Get to know social media & establish platforms.

As I mentioned in #1, getting to know your audience and who might be some of your first website viewers is incredibly important. While you want to be developing your website and social media pages side by side, you are likely to launch your social media pages right away to start getting an audience and reaching out to potential consumers. Pay attention to the demographic of those who like your site, and actively engage your visitors in every way that you can. Your goal is to get as many “clicks” and visitors to your site as soon as it launches.

  • Have you developed social media platforms? Have you begun to promote your brand in meaningful ways?

  1. Share your content and website with others.

When you are getting ready to launch, you will likely want to reach out to supporters (via email or social media) and share the link to your site. If you have people promoting your site right as it launches, not only is thing going to look good for your company, but it also is going to increase your traffic and get your brand’s name out faster than it would have otherwise! Kindly asking your LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter followers to share your website will likely receive a positive outcome.

  • Have you invited others to share your website on social media?

  1. Engage on your website and leave comments.

Once you have some of your blog content up, it is a good idea to be ready to respond to comments and questions right away. In fact, if you did a site preview for anyone in your industry or an early release for customers, kindly ask them to leave comments and feedback on topics that you address on your blog and then reply right away. This sets a good precedence for your site, and shows that you will be actively engaged with your audience. To already have this in the works before you even formally announce your website as “live” is a great way to show that you’re on top of your content and you care about your readers.

  • Do you have early engagement on your website?

  1. Gather testimonials.

Another bonus before launching your company site is to have testimonials from some of your earliest customers and clients available on your site. These days, building a website really does come pretty soon after starting a business, but you likely have contact with some of the first people you work with, and this really helps sell new customers on your products/services when you are a brand new business with a brand new site. According to Outbox Design Studio, this helps to build confidence for your buyers when you are just starting out. Below is a screenshot from VanDelay Designs that shows what testimonials can look like on a website.

  • Are there customers you could ask for testimonials to help establish rapport with early viewers of your website?

testimonials

  1. Line up a content development strategy.

It is always best to go into launching a website prepared. This means that while the content you’ve developed is already live and published, you want to be thinking early-on about what your next pieces of content are going to be. Try to map out a content strategy for the next three months (with at least one piece of new content a week) before you have your site go live. This will help make the next few months after launching easier, but it will also make sure that you stay consistent with your content publications.

  • Have you developed a content plan for the next three months of your website’s life?  We found some help here with one of the best website builder‘s on the market.  Check it out.

  1. You’re ready for what’s coming next.

You really know that you are ready to launch a website when you feel ready for what is coming next. A Moz article written by expert Rand Fishkin talks about 18 metrics you want to run before launching your site, and I highly recommend it! These tips cover aspects of launching a site from the marketing and metrics setup perspective. Fishkin claims that these analyses “…won’t just help with SEO, but on traffic generation, accessibility, and your ability to measure and improve everything about your site”.

My reason for pointing this out is that you are only just beginning! There are so many things that you can do to improve your site before you even launching it. Once you do, there are constantly things you can update, monitor, and improve to impact your site and your SEO.

Note: Keep in mind that you need to make sure you don’t get too tripped up on what needs to be done before. If you feel like the 9 things we addressed in this post are things you have considered and attempted, then you are probably in a good place to launch. Just keep in mind that there is always more you can do and anticipate what is coming next.

Do you have any tips before launching a new website that I might have left out? Let us know in the comments section below, we would love to hear from you.