Customers expect you to use the highest website design standards nowadays. This means that you have to put a lot more thought and effort to build a Drupal website now than ever before.
Your Drupal developer has been working tirelessly for weeks on coding your website. The time for your hard work to pay off has finally arrived and it is now time to celebrate and cheer as you inch closer to the launch.
Wait for a second thought.
Have you taken all the necessary steps to make sure your Drupal website will not get into any unforeseen problems during the launch? It helps to run through a checklist before the launch to make sure everything is taken.
Well, do not worry even if you were too busy preparing the website’s architecture & contents and did not get a chance to create a checklist beforehand.
We are here to help.
Here are 7 key things that your Drupal developer must keep in mind before the launch of your website.
#1 Securing The Root Account
Hackers can create all sorts of problems if they get access to your root account. The root account has unrestricted access to your website and needs to be secured before launch.
There is a high chance that your Drupal developer has used the admin account during the website development. Therefore, the root account name must be changed prior to launch to make it difficult to guess and protect it with a strong password.
#2 Hiring/Removing Unpublished Content
It is common for Web developers to overlook checking the status of nodes before writing custom display code that creates the views. This may sometimes lead to “in works” results displayed on client browsers after the launch.
A Drupal developer must make sure that such filters are used for all the views. It must also be ensured that the status of columns is checked before using any custom SQL on them.
#3 Optimizing Performance
Your web developer needs to go beyond following modern web design practices to build a Drupal website. He/she needs to apply performance optimization techniques to your website.
A Drupal website may encounter multiple HTTP calls for loading each page due to many JavaScript and CSS files being used. Your Drupal developer can use the performance section of your website to enable compression for these files prior to the launch.
Caching should be turned on for all modules to boost website performance before launch – a few modules, like Views, have caching turned off by default.
#4 Taking Care Of SEO
Page loading times are an important part of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – have your web developer fine-tune parameters that affect image optimization, browser caching, lazy loading, and meta tags.
Tune your robots.txt prior to the launch. Also, make sure you have marked the sections of your website that you do not want to be crawled.
It is important to check your URLs for aliases and use 301 redirects properly for better SEO rankings. Your Drupal developer will find it handy to use Global Redirect Module along with PathAuto to achieve this.
#5 Disabling Error Reporting
It looks very unprofessional to throw cryptic Drupal-specific and PHP errors on client browsers. Visit Site configuration > Error reporting before the launch and configure writing errors to system logs. This way, the site visitors will not see the ugly site error messages.
#6 Enabling Auto Security Updates
Drupal will automatically receive security updates for modules where it is enabled. Ensure that this is configured before the launch so that you do not have to manually check and update these security releases manually.
#7 Enabling Statistics
Monitoring is extremely important for your Drupal website to stay on top of security and reliability.
Drupal provides a core statistics module to make this job easier. Make sure to visit the “Advanced Statistics” setting module prior to the launch.
You can also consider configuring services such as Google Analytics for monitoring site usage.
