Tips and advice for startup website launch

[Tone_Agency]

Hi guys

I'm looking for tips and advice to help prevent a startup website launch from embarrassment or disaster.

Couple of examples I have so far are:

1. Test contact and download forms
2. Check website for duplicate content, lorem ipsum and missing content
3. Check page load speed

What would be your best advice/tip(s) be?

Thanks

Anthony

@Anthony_Mac85

P.S. Just to be clear, I'm not looking for advice on how to growth hack a startup website launch.

[Linda-Vassily]

1. Invite test users who were not involved with the development to try out the website and see what they find.

2. Check your robots.txt, meta noindex, and other exclusions to make sure you are not blocking your own content (once you are live).

[MickEdwards]

"Check your robots.txt, meta noindex, and other exclusions to make sure you are not blocking your own content (once you are live)."

Yes, this is far more common than people like to admit.  I'd also add it can be useful to use the Fetch and Render function in Webmaster Tools to check what Google can see once live.  Occasionally robots.txt needs a tweak to stop blocking a particular resource.

[Fuel]

Definitely agree with the "check robots.txt" comment - it really does happen more often than people like to admit.

I would also be sure the website has any relevant schema markups implemented to give search engines as much information about your site as possible.

Check the website in different browswers / different devices to make sure nothing looks wonky and everything functions properly.

Double check / audit title tags & meta descriptions (this can easily be done by using a crawling software like Screaming Frog or something similar)

Be sure any tracking you want to use (Ex: Google Analytics) is properly in place. Also make sure the site is verified with Google Webmaster tools if that is something  you want to monitor (which you should). Submit sitemap to Google Webmaster tools - will need XML version.

Check for any broken links and check to be sure the site has any redirects / canonical tags needed in place.

Also definitely recommend user testing and getting feedback from people not involved with the website.

Some of these might not be user-specific, just wanted to give a general rundown of things we often check.

Hope this helps!

[Tone_Agency]

Linda - awesome tips!

Especially number 1. User testing is something that just isn't on some people's radar, yet it can unveil plenty of unforeseen usability issues.

Thanks for sharing

Anthony

[Tone_Agency]

Hey Michael,

Yes, an incorrect robots.txt is definitely more common than you would think.

I guess the overarching tip to the fetch and render function would be to register your site with Webmaster Tools and make use of their tools.

Thanks for sharing!

Anthony

[Tone_Agency]

Love all of these Fuel Interactive! All of which we do here too so it's pleasing to hear other agencies doing the same

I think cross-browser and cross-device QA is extremely important given the browsing habits of the modern day consumer.

Do you use any tools for cross-browser and cross-device QA?

[Fuel]

We have a few tools that our developers use when they need to - BrowserStack, Virtual  Box, VM Ware, iOS simulator, etc. - most of which are pretty standard. Do you all use anything different?

[Linda-Vassily]

BrowserStack is the one we use--it seems to work pretty well.

[Tone_Agency]

We've used all of those

Others we use are Bootcamp, Virtualbox and we also use inspect element in chrome to emulate devices and remote inspect element using Safari.

[Tone_Agency]

Not forgetting our own personal mobile devices too

[DirkC]

Do a full crawl of your site with a tool like Screaming Frog. If you configure the spider to respect robots.txt & canonicals it will behave like google bot you will see if all your pages are indexed properly. The tool also gives you valuable info on things like H1, Title, Meta descriptions (and standard filters to check if they are missing, duplicates, too long/short,...). It shows your internal site structure (number of clicks needed to get to each page) and the size of your images. You can even use it to check if the analytics tag is present on each page using a custom filter.

It's not free if you use it in spider mode (the free version only spiders 500 URI's) - but if you have a sitemap, you could also do a crawl based on the list of your url's (which is free, regardless the number of url's). Limitation is that you don't get the structure and the internal links, but if it is a brand new site and not too big, that shouldn't really be a problem.

rgds

Dirk

[italiafirenze]

When I prototype a website I use a lot of # href links. I would suggest a search through the source code for "a href="#"" thus removing any of these "dead" links before you go to production.

Note to self: remember to actually do this yourself.

[MickEdwards]

This is a good point.  I am working on a group of sites on wpengine.  So dev was using something like name.staging.wpengine.  When they went live the directories etc switched to the live domain but scattered throughout the site within the content the URLs remained the same.   ScreamingFrog is your friend.

[Tone_Agency]

Hey Dirk

Great advice! I'm a big fan of Screaming Frog too. A handy free tool especially for small startup websites.

Thanks for commenting

[Tone_Agency]

Great shout Craig. Every now and then I'll find a "#" link on live websites. Looks careless and lazy!

[Tone_Agency]

Hey guys

Just wanted to thank you all for your suggestions and let you know that all of your suggestions are included in the final blog post here.

I've thanked you all at the end

Thanks again, I really appreciate it.

Anthony

[Sjani11]

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[Adlanera]

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[Adlanera]

yes you can use so many options to do this task like you can add some blog posts about it you can learn more about it here.