Preparation listThings to do before launching your first WordPress site
Are you getting ready to launch your first WordPress website? It may seem easy to you now when hundreds of websites go live each day. Yet, there are still certain things that you need consider before making your website online.
In fact, your website’s success mainly depends on your efforts towards it, so you have to prepare things in advance. This is why we created this to-do list to help you make your ‘WordPress landing’ safer.
Choose a reliable hosting service
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Picking the right host for your website is an absolutely necessary decision in order to create the foundation for launching a good website. It doesn’t have to be the most expensive one, but you have to make sure that it provides excellent services and support. You should take into account what particular services you need or expect from your hosting provider.
A good host will liberate you from server-related concerns and will let you focus solely on business matters. The best choice is a managed hosting, which usually have offerings that won’t charge you too much if you are a private blog-holder, but includes everything to cover your needs.
Backup your site
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Well, this action can be called a ‘to be or not to be’ matter. Since Internet is not the safest environment, even when you think that things are under control, you might risk losing your precious database.
Most of the time, having a good host is a solid guarantee for backups. Though, you still have to control how the backup is performed. Besides, most backup plans have intervals, and start charging fees after a certain period of time, so it’s better to do it yourself.
We recommend you to automatically schedule backups and use a cloud storage service (Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3 etc).
Secure the admin access
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Here comes another critical aspect: securing admin access. If the admin area on your website is poorly protected, you could become a victim even of the least techie hackers.
WordPress to CMSs is what Windows is to OSs, it basically means that your website can be targeted by cyber criminals. Therefore, an unsecured admin access is an open door for hackers, almost like a cordial invitation to come and take over control.
If you want to protect your admin account, first you must think of an appropriate combination of password and username. Good passwords should have at least ten symbols involving not just letters and numbers, but also special characters.
The username should never be the same as the password, and if you’re posting content, you should never choose the default ‘admin’ user. Bear in mind that this is the first thing a hacker attack will begin with!
Modify your permalinks
Most people are not aware of the harmful effect of ‘dirty’ permalinks, and how bad it looks when they appear on their websites. For example, standard permalinks look like ‘http://www.example.com/?p=11’, which basically means nothing to a visitor.
Your visitor should be able to easily recognize them. You may consult a WordPress designer/developer to help you with changing your permalinks. Or you can do it by yourself: simply go to ‘Settings’>’Permalinks’ and edit the structure keeping in mind the name of your post. Your edited link should look like ‘http://www.example.com/sample-post/’, and will be easily understood and recognized by your visitors. And I think it’s needless to say that this is a precious SEO strategy!
Find 404 Error pages and get rid of them
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404 Error pages are not that likely to appear on new websites, but you never know. Having them appearing on a brand new page creates an awful impression, so make sure that all pages are working properly, without loading delays or link mistakes.
A good tool for preventing 404 pages from happening, or, at least, helps you locate and fix them is Google Webmaster Tool.
Test everything
Your marvelous forms will be unworthy if they’re not properly functioning. Therefore, before you launch your website and start celebrating, test them all and make sure they’re all fine. Especially, pay attention to calls-to-action, contact forms, and forms that gather valuable information from your clients.
Remember, checking forms won’t be easy! You may test them yourself, by doing what is expected to be done, or by asking a group of impartial users to evaluate your prototype and give you honest feedback. If you want users to successfully subscribe to a newsletter, try out if they’re going to receive it by first sending it to yourself. Upon receipt, you will also understand whether the newsletter arrives in the proper mailbox, or ends up in the spam section instead.
For owners of multi-used and multi-authored WordPress sites, we also recommend performing additional checks on log in procedures, registration forms, credentials, and roles. For instance, log in as a user, and find out what should be removed or changed.
Update your copyright information
It may sound like common sense, but certain web owners usually forget about it. It’s an essential step if you’re using a purchased theme: you need to remove/replace all parent company data and references with your own information. Check out the date as well!
Think about having a favicon
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Favicons are unique brand symbols that appear on every page of your website. It helps you increase your brand awareness. Sounds like a small, unnecessary detail, but it’s definitely something you should consider if you intend to use a purchased theme. How will it look like if you’ll neglect it? Will you leave the default favicon that has nothing to do with your brand to appear all across the website? Sounds quite unprofessional, doesn’t it?
Still, we’re not saying that you should pay excessive attention to your favicon, but, at least, do some modest markup and formatting. There are many plug-ins, like Jetpack or Site Icon, that will help you with this. However, remember that they won’t generate the .ico favicon files which you need for the IE under 11 support.
Launching an e-commerce website
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E-commerce websites are more complicated than blogs because they require extensive research and feedback in order to satisfy costumers’ needs. It’s absolutely necessary to adopt the user role and try to predict their browsing, carting, and shopping behavior. In fact, we recommend you to do a trial transaction in order to check whether there is something less smooth than what you expected.
If you sell digital goods, make sure to deliver them promptly. If you work with physical goods, establish excellent communication with deliverers and test the completing process of your orders (the checkout in particular).
Another thing that is very important to check is the call-to-action: Does it function properly? Is it placed in the right place? Is the content overlaying it? You must do some testing before choosing the right option.
Being mobile-friendly
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Today users are relying more and more on mobile technology to accomplish almost every online activity.
Have in mind that your website will be used on phone and tablets, so replicate the desktop experience there: let users log in flawlessly, give them a functional shopping cart, and most of all, readable information. Before you launch your website, use Mobile Test to check your theme’s responsiveness.
Test sliders, videos, and images
You want to make your website entertaining and interactive, and that’s the right approach. You need images and videos to attract people’s attention, but make sure that those files are not affecting your loading time and website performance at the same time.
Check their size and display, and test whether they’re working in accordance with your requirements. Sliders are also important to check because you need them to function flawlessly.
CDN/Caching
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Loading times are a big concern for every website, so you may want to deal with them in advance. The faster your pages are loaded, the more visitors you’ll get and you will rank higher on search engines.
You can achieve this by adding a specific code or a caching plug-in, that will increase your website’s speed without having to build them with PHP over and over again. The most popular cache plug-ins are WP Super Cache and WP Fastest Cache.
If you’ll make to sure have all these things done before launching your website, you will be fully prepared to go online. Having a strong foundation for your website is the essence of its performance. Yet, if you have some personal tips on website pre-launch preparation, please share them with us through a comment.
