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Looking for a post-launch checklist to keep handy after you push your new site live? Maybe you’re panicking after you launched your new site and want to make sure you have your bases covered.

Have no fear – check out our tips to finalize your site!

Redirects

One thing that we expect to see after a redesign is that traffic will drop for a while. When we take on new clients who have recently redesigned their websites and are concerned that their traffic has dropped significantly, we can usually trace it back to the fact that 301 redirects were not completed.

So if you changed your domain name, changed the URL paths of your pages, consolidated your website, or just have a lot of outlying pages you want to get rid of, you need to make sure you create proper redirects on your site.

Redirects are enacted differently across various content management systems (CMS), so here are some helpful guides for some of the most popular platforms:

SSL Certificate

If you switched hosting companies, or are working with an entirely new content management system, be sure to ask your hosting provider or the IT support of your content management system to get an SSL certificate for your new website. This ensures your site is secure and will greatly help you in the eyes of Google and other search engines.

Tracking Codes

After you launch your new website, be sure that you have gone through and added all the tracking codes you were using before. These could include platforms such as:

  • Google Analytics/Google Tag Manager
  • Google Ads
  • CRM tracking
  • Call tracking
  • And many more

Forms

Did you create new web forms for your website? You will want to make sure these next two things are properly configured:

Thank You Pages

If you didn’t modify your thank you page URLs, you should be safe. However, it’s always a good idea to test the forms and make sure that working thank you pages are in place. If not, just make new thank you pages and link them to your forms.

Goal Tracking

After you have confirmed that the thank you pages are working, and the Google Analytics code is properly installed on your new site, head over to the “Real Time” area in GA while you are testing your forms to make sure everything is triggering properly.

And if you made new thank you pages, be sure to update your goals with the new URLs and repeat the process stated above. If you are unfamiliar with goal tracking, be sure to check out our post on goal tracking in GA4.

Indexing

On your staging site (also called a dev site), you likely (hopefully) had your settings configured to noindex your website during development. If so, be sure that you change your website settings to now index your website since it has launched, otherwise Google and other search engines won’t be able to find your website and will remove you from search results!

Sitemaps

After you have re-indexed your website, be sure to resubmit your sitemap to Google and Bing so they can read your new pages. This can be performed through various plugins if you are using WordPress, or also via Google Search Console.

Plugins, Add-ons, Extensions

Many platforms like WordPress, Shopify, and more can be pretty dependent on plugins or add-ons to create things such as PPC landing pages, metadata, redirects, and elsewise. So when you launch your new website, be sure that you have added and activated all the things that your old website was using to make sure that nothing is interrupted.

Internal Links

If you were doing interlinking on the pages of your staging site, then it’s likely that when you hover over the links post-launch, they may still be linked to the development site’s URL! Be sure to contact your web developer to see if they are able to add a search and replace plugin or add-on to the site to easily swap out all the URLs to be the live domain.

Images and Videos

Sometimes, certain files may not be properly ported over after launching a website. So check your pages to ensure photos and any embedded videos are displaying properly. Sadly, this process is likely only done manually so it may take some time, but it can make or break someone leaving your site if they think it is broken!

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This post was originally published in 2020 and has been updated for new information.

About the Author

Sarah Blocksidge

Sarah is our internal Marketing Director and crafts all of our agency's SEO strategies and helps manage our pay-per-click efforts to help us get more clients. She joined the company in 2016 after completing her degree in Strategic Communication at Miami University. Over the years her marketing advice has been featured in Fox Business, Search Engine Land, Content Marketing Institute, HubSpot, Fortune, and more. Follow Sarah on LinkedIn.