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Congratulations on launching that new website! Once your site is online, you can focus more resources on other activities, but don’t move too quickly. After a site goes live, you need to make time for several technical and nontechnical tasks designed to make sure the site is performing as expected and is easy to use. Testing and marketing should be an ongoing effort.

Testing Your Site

Once the site goes live, you must schedule various tasks related to maintenance. Take care of backups for all data and site content. Be sure someone is applying security patches and updates, especially security patches.

The first and most important thing to consider once your site is live is to confirm that it delivers a great user experience. Here are some of the things you need to do:

    ●  Check that internal and external links work

    ●  Make sure external links open in a new tab, not the current one

    ●  Confirm your website’s appearance is correct across browsers and devices

    ●  Verify that social media sharing icons work as expected

    ●  Ensure the contact forms, and other forms, submit data correctly

If you have third-party plugins like e-commerce or email, make sure they work as expected. If they are buggy or unreliable, this will make visitors unhappy.

Purchase an SSL certificate if you don’t already have one. This will put visitors at ease and help with your ranking on Google. How much? Well, no one knows that, but SSL certificates do help.

Accessibility is huge, so check that your web accessibility features, like alt image tags, are working. Experts will say that accessibility alone does not affect your search engine ranking but things that make a site more accessible do. Seek certification that your website complies with Section 508 or WCAG 2.0 standards, too. Furthermore, you’ll please visitors who need that kind of support to interact with your site.

Schedule a site audit. You want to make sure your site’s tags, images, links, descriptions, and keywords still work to promote the site. Sometimes the keywords you’ve focused on become less important and others become more important, so you need to adjust your content periodically.

Promoting Your Site

Launching your new website is the beginning of a journey toward marketing success. Maximize your odds by taking regular steps to promote your site online, not just through search engines.

●   Submit your XML sitemap: This sitemap is a directory for the site, designed for a search engine to read, not a human. If you have pages that aren’t internally linked to other pages, this sitemap helps those pages be found. If you update your pages frequently, Google will crawl the updated pages, too. This matters to your future visitors, who want up-to-date content, and to Google which wants to present the newest versions of your pages to searchers.

●   Content is king: Add new page content or new blog posts regularly. If you have old blog posts that need updating, do that instead of deleting them. Use good search engine optimization practices on your blogs and pages, too.

●   Use Google My Busines: This is a great, free tool for promoting products and services and making announcements. You can post over 130 words, an image, and a link to the relevant page on your site.

●   Do Off-Site SEO: Launch a sustained campaign of promoting your site by getting links from blog sites and review sites.

●   Leverage Your Social Media Accounts: Advertise that new site on Facebook, LinkedIn, and so on. Create a plan for promoting company news and information on your social media accounts.

A Great Post-Launch Period is Critical

Make it easier for web surfers to find your website by creating great content and making it easy for search engines to understand what you offer. You do that through technical SEO and off-site links. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you create and manage a site that gets plenty of relevant traffic.