The Ultimate WordPress Launch Checklist 2022

Are you developing a WordPress website for yourself or your client?

Complete your WordPress website development tasks like a pro with this handy to-do WordPress checklist that saves you from the hard moments.

Launching a website is and will be complex and complicated. An individual must remain calm and composed to avoid making any mistakes in the process. You will not miss any steps if you use this Checklist because we have covered both the basic and more complex ones.

In this WordPress Launch Checklist, you will get to know all the things from basic to complex that are imperative for making your brand-new website successful and secure. Go through each point and avoid all oops moments.

PREREQUISITES

However, before launching any website, certain prerequisites need to be followed. The last thing you want to do is disappoint your customers by launching a website that doesn’t work. To avoid this, and to also avoid last-minute updates, we have curated separate prerequisite sections for all the first-time and regular users.

It is advised by the WordPress Experts to complete this particular section 4 weeks in advance. However, this will not only help you feel prepared but will also give you time to work on the errors and launch the website on time!

But what are these pointers? Let’s Find Out!

1. Domain Name & Web Hosting

Okay, this is the first and the most important one, to begin with! So, the first key to launching a successful website is to set up successful web hosting for your site.

Let us also, in brief, understand what web hosting is actually about for first-time users.

When a hosting provider allocates space on a web server for a website to store its files, they are hosting a website. Web hosting makes the files that comprise a website (code, images, etc.) available for viewing online. Therefore, every website you’ve ever visited is hosted on a server, which makes this step significant to check off the list.

PRO TIP: If you have your hosting provider handle the domain name registration, then you don’t have to handle the paperwork to take care of this.

Recommendations for Web Hosting are:

• WP Engine
• Inmotion Hosting
• Hostinger
• BlueHost

It is also important to purchase a domain name for your website. A domain name acts as an identification string that defines your control and authority over your website. This is one point in this WordPress launch checklist that you can not forget or miss.

2. Install WordPress Back Up Option

Let us break this down in simple words. It is advised to always have life insurance, to be prepared for all the worst-case scenarios. However, installing a backup for your WordPress works as life insurance for your website. Moreover, if anything goes wrong with your website after launching it, you will still have all the data.

There are both FREE and PREMIUM plug-ins that you can use to back up your data with complete ease and no complications.

Firstly, make sure the plugin you choose for successfully backing up your WordPress site automatically schedules your backups to save to the cloud. Some of my favorite cloud storage services like Google Drive, Amazon S3, and Dropbox are popular options.

Therefore, you can also follow this mini checklist to make sure you have backed up your site successfully.

✅Install A WordPress Backup & Security Solution To Keep Hackers Away

✅Schedule a Backup Of Your Entire WordPress site

✅Download The zip File Of Your Backup

✅Allow Two-Factor Authentication

3. Curate Significant Pages (About Page, Contact Page, Custom 404, and Coming Soon Page)

After setting up your Web Hosting, deciding on your domain name, and backing up your WordPress site, we’ll now move on to curating significant pages for your site.

• About Us Page:

This page gives you the chance to define your brand in the best possible way. However, the main purpose of building and curating the page is to inform the readers or the users about your brand and its operations.

• The Contact Page:

The contact page acts as a bridge between the brand and its customers. Moreover, they exist to serve the user to provide them with information on how they can get in touch with you.

• Custom 404 Page:

The main purpose of building this WordPress checklist for all the readers was to ensure they take one step at a time and not get puzzled.

But as you are our favorite reader, we have a solution for you! 

Whereas, installing a 404 page before you launch your WordPress website helps you engage your visitors and direct them to another area on your site.

For Instance, refer WP Swing’s 404 error page.

• Coming Soon Page:

It is important to provide your visitors with something to look forward to when they visit your site as a pre-launch marketing strategy for the website. However, coming soon page does this job effortlessly!

Consider this page to be a teaser. You are preparing your site visitors and customers for what you have in store for them, it lets people know that something is coming and allows them to stay notified.

4. Themes & Plugins

After successfully curating all the important pages and as discussed above, it is also vital to install and update all the existing plugins and themes.

It is suggested for all users and admins install a theme that is SEO-friendly. It is very natural for the user to choose the theme that will make your website aesthetic, but it is important to install a theme for your website that is SEO-friendly.

However, you can consider the plugins to be the building blocks. They bring significant and relevant features to your website.

5. Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Let us first understand the concept of a Content Delivery Network.

The main motive of CDN is to avoid delayed responses when the user tries to access a webpage or stream a video online.

Here, we say it’s the weekend and you want to stay in and stream the latest Hollywood movie release. However, the control of a CDN is to find a working server to serve up the video.

Source: dinCloud

While the delivery of website content is a common use for CDNs.

CDNs have a variety of different functions such as they deliver content that includes: 4K and HD-quality video, audio streams, software downloads such as apps, games, OS updates, and much more. Any data that can be digitized can be delivered through a content delivery network.

ON-GOING

After carefully following and checking off all the prerequisite pointers of the WordPress checklist, we move on to the “ON-GOING” section. Therefore, we will talk about the points that you should keep in mind after that the working of the launched website.

6. Decide the Content

Once the user has followed all the prerequisite pointers, the user is now ready to decide the type of content that they want to publish online. The content here is of two main types:

• Landing Page Content

The content published on the landing page should be short, concise, and should capture the readers’ attention. We have curated a mini WordPress launch checklist, especially for the landing page for all the readers.

✅Replace Dummy Content

✅Cross-Check The Structure Of Your Content

✅Make use of Proper Headings & Subheadings

✅Include Attractive & Compressed Images

✅Check The Flow Of Content

✅Proofread & Remove Content Errors

✅Review CTAs Of The Page

✅Eradicate Broken Links

✅Remove 404 Error

✅Videos Should Include “?rel=0”

✅Check All Sliders & Audio

✅Perform SEO Of The Page

✅Upload an OG Image

• Content for Blogs Section:

Blogs posts allow you and your website to share your brands’ messages, insights, and stories by publishing content on different topics. Therefore, we have curated a mini WordPress launch checklist, especially for the blogs section for all the readers.

✅Finalize An Attractive Heading

✅Assign SEO Keywords

✅Start Crafting Content Using Your Focus Keyword

✅Give Credit To Original Source Of Information

✅Perform Content Editing 2-3 Times

✅Proofread Content

✅Prepare Feature & Supporting Images

✅Check Plag & Readability

✅Start Drafting Your Content On WordPress

✅Give A Structure To Your Content

✅Include External/Internal Links

✅Provide a Table Of Content Using Jump to

✅Include “nofollow” & “target=_blank”

✅Utilize Tags, SEO Title, Slug, Meta-Description, OG Image

✅Select Category Of Your Post

✅Add Related Articles

✅Draft An Author Bio

✅Check the CSS Of Your Post

✅Include Compressed Images

✅Embed relevant Videos & add “?rel=0”

• Products Section Content:

If you want to sell products on your website, you can also make separate product sections and publish content there. You can  go through this particular checklist curated especially for eCommerce websites: The Ultimate Pre-launch Checklist for Your WordPress eCommerce Website

7. Creatives and Images

After that, successfully deciding the type of content you want to post, it is now important to decide on the creatives that are matching your content. While drafting the content on the backend of your website, it is important that the name, title, and alt text of your images directly link with this as it helps support features like screen readers. Therefore, it is said, that it’s a critical SEO feature.

For instance you can refer the backend of a website and how you add the ALT text:

8. Select the Categories & Tags

The users can think of categories & tags as the table of content. It helps you to be more organized, and in WordPress, you must categorize your published content, or it goes in the uncategorized list, and it’s of no use to anybody.

However, tags are as important as categories, in a study, it was revealed that a client got 100,000 unique visitors per month. And, more than 3% of those are referred to by tags listed in the SERPs.

9. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) & Marketing

This particular section of your WordPress launch checklist deals with your website’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how you’ll market your website.

Moreover, it is a very significant aspect because this is how people will find your site in search engines and boost organic traffic. Other than, SEO you can market your website by doing Social Media Marketing or Paid Advertisements.

Therefore, the sole purpose of the WordPress launch checklist was to make the job of the users effortless. We have further curated two separate mini checklists.

SEO Checklist (Search Engine Optimization):

✅Install, Set-Up & Activate SEO Plugin

✅Keep Up SEO Friendly Permalinks

✅Utilize A Focus Keyword

✅Set SEO Title & Tagline

✅Prepare A Meta-Description & Meta-Tags

✅Provide Proper Headings [H1, H2, H3….H6]

✅Add Image Alt Text & Alternative Attribute

✅Use Short URLs (Avoid Numbers In URLs)

✅Check the “dofollow” & ‘nofollow” Links

✅Perform Interlinking

✅Make use of “target=_blank”

✅Review Affiliate Links

✅Make use of  Sitemaps

✅Submit Your Page For Indexing

✅Use Social Signals

✅Prepare Schema Of Site

✅Perform Local SEO

✅Verify Mobile Responsiveness

✅Resolve All Broken Links

✅Create Blog Categories

Marketing Checklist:

✅Add Forms For Sign-Ups

✅Attract Leads Using Pop-Ups

✅Create An Email Campaign

✅Include Social Icons

✅Share Your Post On Social Networking Sites

10. Connect to Analytics and Other Tools

Imagine you’ve been working out rigorously in the gym, but you forgot to keep a track of all calories that you’ve been burning. There is no point in working out if you don’t keep a track of your performance. Similarly, it is important to keep a track of the performance of your website. This will help you improve your website’s efficiency. After that, all the time which you’ve spent on building and readying things, you must know how many users are visiting, how they got there, and where they spend the most time.

The best way to track this is by using Google Analytics. More than 30-50 million+ users are currently using Google Analytics to track the performance of their websites.

LAUNCH & EXECUTION

Now, that you have carefully followed and checked off the WordPress checklist, we are finally ready to move on to the next and final section. Once you have launched your website successfully, you just can not leave it unattended. There are certain points that you must keep in mind for the smooth running of your launched website.

11. Manage the Security

After launching a website, it becomes crucial to check for its security. As discussed above, WordPress is actively used by 50 million+ users all around the world.

This comes with its own pros and cons. The cons being WordPress is an easy target for hackers as well. So, How can you protect your website? Therefore, we’ve created a mini WordPress launch checklist just for this!

✅Install A WordPress Backup & Security Solution To Keep Hackers Away

✅Schedule a Backup Of Your Entire WordPress site

✅Download The zip File Of Your Backup

✅Allow Two-Factor Authentication

✅Use Your Email Address For Security Purposes

✅Create A Potent Password

✅Update Your WordPress Site including plugins Regularly

✅Define User Roles

✅Remove Themes And Plugins That Are Causes Harm To Your Site

✅Confine Login Tries With WordPress Brute Force Protection

Thus, if you follow these points, you can manage the security and safeguard your website.

12. Maintenance of the Website

It is also important to maintain the launched website. So, you must check minor details like the image alignment or spelling errors. You can also try installing different plugins that are compatible with WordPress and that help you maintain your website with ease.

But as you are our favorite reader, we have also curated a mini checklist for you!

✅Update Theme & Plugins

✅Focus On Page Load Time

✅Check Broken Links & 404 Errors

✅Keep Improving Your SEO

✅Post Content Regularly

✅Optimize Your Website Content And Pages

✅Work On Enhancing User Experience

There are times when you lose customers because your site is not maintained properly. However, if the user follows the steps, and successfully checks all the points off, you can avoid it. So, it is crucial to follow these.

13. Check for the Broken Links

But, technically, this is a part of the maintenance point. However, because it is so important, we decided to write it separately. Broken links are both inconvenient for your website’s visitors and detrimental to its SEO.

So, you must check for broken links as it is an important aspect of SEO and helps you build a successful website for the future.

And, there are SEO tools like Ahrefs or SEMRUSH that help you find all the broken links and fix them as well. But there are other tools as well that are available online.

14. Review the Responsiveness of the Content

So, after launching your website, it is also important to check whether your website is responsive to your concerned devices like what you had planned it to perform. Along with that, you should also set out the standards for your business and try your level best to meet them.

Firstly, you can check the responsiveness of your website by conducting surveys, and referring to the tools available online like responsinator.com, and use this tool carefully.

However, making websites that can adapt to the size of the visitor’s viewport is what responsive web design is all about. Whereas, the idea is for content to appear differently based on the device, and screen size, ensuring that visitors enjoy the greatest possible experience no matter how they access a website.

Therefore, the primary advantage of responsive web design is that sites load quickly and without distortions, eliminating the need for users to manually resize anything to view content.

So, the user must realize the value of a site being responsive in nature, as it helps you convert potential customers into customers.

15. Site Audit

Whereas, this is the final step in your WordPress Launch Checklist. But why is it significant, and what does it serve? However, the purpose of a site audit is to provide webmasters with a complete and detailed analysis of their sites’ health, performance, and speed. And, the main objective is to assess your website’s performance and efficiency.

Following the site audit, the following parameters are checked:

✅Manage the Onsite and technical SEO

✅Page speed

✅Internal links

✅Meta descriptions

✅Broken links

✅External links, and other factors, including

✅Robots.txt

✅Load time

✅Web page titles, and

✅Site structure

So, now you know how important and crucial a site audit is for the working of a website and increasing the visitors of your website.

Wrapping up the Ultimate WordPress Launch Checklist

So, launching a WordPress site is no joke, as you can now figure out through this checklist. It is, however, not rocket science. As a result, following the checklist makes the entire process much easier. And, it also helps the users to avoid last-minute changes.