Launching a website is one of the most challenging tasks ever encountered. On the other hand, it can be really exciting now that you are about to show off your brand’s new look.
It is important to plan your new website launch well to avoid making mistakes that many individuals and business website owners do.
What to consider before launching a new website
Having this in mind, the following tips will help you through the process of making your website launch a success. So now, what do you need to do? Let’s see below.
1. Choose the best and right platform for your website
The website platform you choose depends on what your business entails and what works best for you. You need to do thorough homework before settling on a website platform to use.
Seek for expert bits of advice and settle on the factual platform. This is not a matter of following your guts as you may fall terribly.
Whether you are coming up with a new website or rebuilding the existing one, the reason it stands or falls depends on the website platform you chose to bank on. Choose a platform that is flexible and that will give you a solid search engine optimization (SEO) from the very first day.
2. Choose a perfect domain name
Always keep in mind that a bad domain name translates to a bad experience in the future. Not well-chosen domain names are hard to recover from especially to brand new websites.
Make sure the domain name is perfect. You don’t want to be forced to launch a whole new website right after you have launched the first one.
It will be costly in terms of time, money, and search engine optimization potential. Nobody wants to go through such an embarrassment neither.
3. Don’t igfnore web hosting
You might be wondering what web hosting is all about and the role it plays in a new website launch. Web hosting tends to be under-considered by the majority of website builders.
Everyone wants something that is easy and to the point, something that is working. But they don’t actually understand what it takes to get the website working smoothly is a good web hosting.
The right hosting touches on important aspects of search engine optimization like the speed of the site and helps you out when it comes to long-term plans such as website redesigning and expansion.
It is important to note that any type of old hosting will not work so well for your new website. Embrace current trends such as VPS cloud server hosting which handles the traffic you throw at it allowing room for future traffic as a result of the expansion.
4. Develop a pre-launch page
Your website needs to be promoted as soon as it is ready whether it already has visitors or not. A pre-launch promotion could really surprise you driving more interest from visitors more than after the actual launch is done.
A coming soon page builds anticipation and engagement to the user before the website launch date. When setting up a pre-launch, make sure you communicate to the visitors when the actual launch will take place.
A sign-up box, in this case, could be the best way to notify your visitors about the website’s actual launch date. A coming soon page creates memories.
5. Create 5 informative, high-quality articles
Creating high-quality content for your page is one of the top promotional strategies you should embrace. Visitors come to your page with the anticipation of seeing excellent content that will make them want to visit your page over and over again.
Before the launch, come up with engaging content of more than 1,000 words each so that you may have the best chance of ranking in the search engines. Good content also gives you the chance of getting links to your website.
In your content, including details like “how to post”, tutorials, request for experts’ opinions and advice, the definition of terminologies around your industry, and practical pieces of advice relating to your industry, etc.
6. Invite visitors to sign up for your email list
Come up with a way that your visitors can sign up for your email list. This is the best way to ensure you stay connected to your visitors even if they visit your site again.
Include an incentive for the visitors whenever they join your list.
You may offer your visitors free guides or eBooks offering helpful information about your industry to the target audience.
7. Set up for publicity with digital alerts
Stay updated with when and where your blog name is mentioned online. This will help you know whether your outreach strategies are working or you should embrace new ways.
Sign up for Google Alerts to get notified of any of your blog names mentions online. Follow up on social media to get to see what people think about your website to gauge the efforts of your outreach success. Embrace digital marketing services to help you push your brand name as much as possible.
8. Test your website for usability
Before launching your website, you need to test its usability first. There are a lot of things involved when testing for website usability. You need to make sure that you test for readability as the first step. Once you test readability, check whether the website works on various browsers especially the mostly used.
Test whether the website can be accessed through mobile. Find out whether your visitors will be able to go around the website with ease.
If you have met all of these steps correctly, then that means you are on the right road to a successful website. If you have not met any of the above, get back to the drawing board and get it right.
Final verdict on launching a new website
Besides everything that has been said, ask people around to share and subscribe to your list and provide them with an easy way of how to. Always keep your ears and eyes open to get to know what people are saying about you or your brand and improve to serve your target audience the way they prefer to be served.
This guest blog article was written by Patrick Watt, a content writer. He loves to write about business growth, value creation, mergers and acquisitions, finance, content marketing, and self-development. Follow him on Twitter @patrickwattpat.