It’s a moment of satisfaction to launch your website after the collective hard work & effort made by you and your web developer.
But before you finally launch your website, you must go through a few important checklists in order to ensure that you get desired results from your website.
In the absence of proper website testing, things may go wrong. For instance, your website may have several broken links or incorrect content that will not only turn away your users but can also damage the reputation of your business.
In this blog post, we have shared 12 web design checklists that you or your website builder must follow before launching the website.
#1 SSL (for security)
SSL (secured socket layer) is perhaps the most important thing that you need for your website. Especially if your website collects any sensitive information like personal details, credit card, and banking details from the users, make sure your website has an SSL Certificate.
Recommended post: 6 Reasons to secure your WordPress website
#2 Anti-malware plugin (for security)
Just like your laptop or computer needs anti-virus software to keep away the viruses and malware infections, in the same way your website also needs security from all the potential threats.
Before you hire any website developer, you must ensure that he or she is able to protect your website from viruses and malware.
#3 Content check (for readability)
Have you double-checked your content before publishing your website? If not, do so. Yes, before making your website live, do ensure to check your contents for all the possible errors like spelling mistakes, grammar issues, etc.
#4 Image check (for performance)
How images have been used on your website? Are they able to load quickly or do they need some optimization for their file size?
If you find that the images on your website are looking blurred or taking forever to load, you must ask your web developer to fix this issue for you.
Image optimization can help your website to have high user retention and at the same time improve your search engine rankings too.
#5 UX check (for design)
Before rolling out your website live for the public, you do need to compare and make sure that your website is according to the finalized UX designs that your web designer had created.
Recommended post: 6 Web design tips to enhance the user experience on your website
#6 Responsiveness (for design)
If you really want to cater to a wide audience, you must ensure that your website has been optimized for all desktops, laptops, mobiles, and tablets. If your website is not responsive, your users won’t give a second thought to quitting your website.
Recommended post: What are the benefits of responsive website design
#7 Fonts & typography (for readability)
Is the content of your website readable & easy-to-Scan? If not, you must insist your web developer make the adjustments in the font style accordingly because the readability of any website plays an important role in the user retention rate & overall conversions.
#8 Browser compatibility (for performance)
How does your website look on different browsers? Do ensure to check the performance & rendering of your website on some of the major browsers like Chrome, Mozilla, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Opera.
#9 Loading speed (for performance)
How much time does your website take to load on any browser? If it takes more than 4 seconds, it could affect your viewership badly. And if you run an e-commerce business, slow loading speed can affect your overall sales & revenue too.
Therefore, the loading time of any website must be considered seriously and must be fixed by your web designer, if required.
Recommended post: 7 Ways to speed up your WordPress website
#10 Caching (for performance)
Caching helps to optimize the website’s speed by reducing the load on the server and minifying the time-consuming scripts such as CSS & JavaScript.
Therefore, do ensure that the caching of your website must always be turned on. If your web developer has used WordPress to build your website, then it’s even easier to install a cache plugin such as “W3 Total Cache” and improve the performance of your website.
#11 Broken links (for user-experience)
Broken links are the links that lead to nowhere upon click. In other words, when you click any link and it shows a “page not found” error, it can be considered as a broken link.
Broken links can affect your website in 2 major ways:
- They can affect the user experience and as a result, they can lead to a high bounce rate.
- Broken links can also affect the SEO score of your website.
Therefore, do ensure that your website doesn’t have any broken links.
#12 Meta tags ( for SEO)
Although SEO (search engine optimization) is totally a different concept than website development, it does start from the website first.
Ensuring that your webpages have relevant meta tags like description, title, etc., you may have higher chances to rank on noticeable positions of search engines.
