If you’ve ever designed your own website, you know how challenging it can be. There are a thousand decisions that have to be made that all need to fit within the vision and scope of what you’re trying to accomplish. And, not only do you have to create the site according to that idea, it actually needs to work. Throughout the entire process from choosing which website building platform to use, to the design phase, to creating the content, to building in the right forms and choosing what plugins you’ll use, there’s an attention to detail that can be lost when digging into each of these steps. When launch day comes, your website needs to seamlessly work from the moment you make it public.
As you get closer to the finish line, it’s incredibly easy to lose sight of the detailed functionality of your website and settle for “good enough.” But, you’ve put too much effort into this thing to just let it be good enough. Your website deserves to be great. And it shouldn’t only be great for you, it should be great for your customers, from the very first moment they enter your site. First impressions matter, so do what you can to make yours an incredible one. While you can’t always anticipate every problem your website might have, you can avoid these four mistakes to help ensure your site launch is as great as it should be.
Four Mistakes to Avoid to Launch a Stellar Site
- It isn’t SEO optimized. SEO optimization is all about giving your website a fighting chance to stand out among the crowd. Though it’s tempting to think about SEO optimization just in terms of getting more visibility on search engines, try to instead think about it in terms of how effectively your website is communicating your business. Because, if you forget about Google rankings for a second (impossible as it may be), effective communication is at the core of SEO. It’s optimizing every page to clearly communicate its content so more people can connect to that content (and so connect to your business). If your website isn’t SEO optimized, there’s a huge possibility that it’s not communicating the way you might assume it is. Check out Yoast SEO for a great tool for SEO that will help your site be optimized for search engines.
- There are broken links everywhere. Over the course of creating your website, it’s possible that pages you linked to have been switched around, unlinked, the URL themselves changed, or have been altogether deleted. In other words, there are a thousand different ways broken links can appear while you’re creating your website. While there are SEO tools that can help analyze websites for these broken links, if it’s at all possible, spend the time to click through every link to make sure your links take your online visitors where they’re wanting to go.
- Your forms aren’t going anywhere. Imagine this: you just launched your website and everything is going great. You’re getting an incredible number of visitors, they’re engaging with your content, and they’re even filling out your call to action forms, but there’s just one problem. The information from those forms aren’t going anywhere! Yikes. Double, triple, even quadruple check to make sure your forms are being directed to where they should go once filled out. Forms to double check would be any call to action forms you have on your site (like your Hello Bar) and contact forms.
- You don’t have your site analytics set up. Like SEO optimization, this step might seem like something you could do down the road once the hard work of getting your website up and running is done. Don’t do it! If you skip out on getting solid analytics before you launch your website, you’ll be flying blind as to how it’s actually performing. And, let’s face it, you can’t fix something if you don’t know what’s wrong. Analytics are the heartbeat of your website and can tell you so much about its performance (as well as help maximize the number of leads your website creates). Looking for some great analytic tools? Check out HotJar and Databox for comprehensive web analytics that can give you an in depth look at what visitors are doing on your website.
The Beef
Here’s a fifth mistake to avoid, not calling Beefy to help you implement a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy that works with your website to generate the leads you need. Drop our inbound marketing experts a line today to see how we can help you.
