A cool site is the ultimate result of the overall attempts exercised by a rocking web development crew where each one of them has a vital participation to make. You have created an excellent website with one of these best sitebuilders! You are excited, your company is happy!
The CMS has been operating quite fine, and you have appended fresh pieces of content on your site, and the client has examined all these and seems to be quite satisfied. You are now ready to launch the site.
Wait, take a pause! Is that all? Don’t be in haste, do you want to pour water over all your hard work and effort?
Usually, people tend to forget quite some the key features of a website design in their eagerness to begin the websites. It is always advised that you keep a checklist of the things that requires being reviewed before you make your site live.
Here, we are presenting some of the most important checks for testing your site to improve the overall user experience and also these checks will encourage you to avoid any additional or needless costs that occur when you overlook or ignore to add some particular details in your website due to negligence.
1 – Favicon
Favicon presents your site a great professional look. Favicon is also known as the tab icon or bookmark icon or shortcut icon. It is one of the best ways that visitors can distinguish your site when many tabs are open in the browser window simultaneously.
Specifically, favicon can be observed upon as something that brands the window or tab in which the user has kept your site open in their browser.
2 – Proofread Your Copy
Make certain you proofread all of the content on your site, going page by page to review for accurate spelling, punctuation, capitalization, grammar, etc. Avoid using huge blocks of text, and rather break up your draft into shorter, more “digestible” paragraphs as much as possible.
3 – Labeling Images – Alt Tags
This one can be time-consuming but is good standard practice for all websites as it’s excellent for SEO if done properly. You need to consider people with their images turned off, slow internet connections, or sight problems who use screen readers.
This text will display instead of the picture. That means you should actually describe each photograph or graphic on your site.
Tip: A detailed guide on How to Create Free Images for Blog Even if You Are Not a Designer
4 – 301 Redirects
301 redirects usually tell, “Hey Search Engine, this page no longer here and have permanently shifted to this new page.”
5 – All Pages Are Linked
It’s essential that visitors to your site can efficiently move around between internal blog pages seamlessly. You never desire a visitor to feel “lost.” Make certain that you’re using navigation links to precisely supervise readers to the various pages of your site.
A big rule of thumb is to have all internal links (those that open other pages within your site) open in the same window while setting external links (URLs for other websites) to open in a new window.
6 – Analytics
How do you estimate the number of visitors reaching out to your site? A lot of bloggers miss to add analytics to their site, and this leaves me questioning how do they examine the value of their site.
You require installing the analytics tools that plays a significant role in helping you get a statistics of how efficiently your site does and also estimate the conversion rates of your site.
7 – Sitemap
This is another significant aspect that benefits some of the major search engines to index sites with ease. You just require to include a sitemap. XML file in the root directory that points crawlers to all the pages on your site. This is how it goes:
Use XML-Sitemaps that is automatically proficient of creating a sitemap.xml files for you. Once the file is created, upload it to the root directory so that you have the location as: www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml.
If your site is powered by WordPress, you require to get the Google XML Sitemaps plug-in, which is capable of automatically updating the sitemap whenever a new post is added.
8 – Page Titles
Page titles hold the most crucial aspects of SEO, and while drafting page titles, you require to take care to assure that these are definite, clear and hold the exact description of the content presented on the page.
Assure that your title does not exceed 70 characters so that it doesn’t have its tailpiece cut off in the search results. When you enter the appropriate keywords in the title, you are assuring that it gets crawled and your website will touch the target audiences.
9 – Meta Descriptions
Search engine rankings are not relying on meta descriptions anymore, but still, they are an essential aspect that requires being brought into a concern to reach your aim readers.
Meta descriptions help the webmasters with an edge to promote their content to searchers, and this encourages the people to identify whether they are going to enter on a page that holds the important information.
10 – Functionality Checks
This is one of the most significant aspects of a website’s design. If you have a contact form on your site, make certain that it all the entities are performing perfectly commencing with either it gets redirected to the relevant thank you page and also gets send to the designated person.
The functionality of the social share icons, the company logo, and also the links that will assist people to navigate back to the homepage of the site, etc.
Test each and every functionality for yourself. Ask others to cross check it again. Don’t make a vague assumption.
These are the necessary basic checks that you require to work on your site before making it live. Do you offer these necessary checks on your site before launching it? Have you ever encountered errors while checking? Share your experiences with us.