WordPress is the dream for all non technical people to make a website in the easiest way in all fields about using websites. Also, WordPress has a store with more than 50000 plugin you can use for all functions. But you have to know exactly what you want before starting. Actually in this article, we will introduce a powerful checklist about important major three steps after, during installation, and after installation WordPress website.

Before launching website and after WordPress

Before starting to work on WordPress website, you need to make a checklist to make you remember the important things that you need to do and make it a powerful one. You can execute the following steps after installing WordPress as follows in this post.

1.Installing a WordPress backup plugin

You need to  setup a backup plugin as a safety factor for your website. This backup plugin will help you to take a copy from your whole website and upload it on any other cloud service Dropbox, google drive, or microsoft drive. If something bad happened for your website, like hacking or a bad move in programming, you can use this backup file to restore the whole website from the beginning instead starting from scratch.

You can make it on your server but backup plugin can make it automatically on fixed schedule without a lot of hassle.

2.Securing the website

Security is one of the most important things on your website. You have to get one of security applications to make your website secure from any malware or hacking attacks. These attacks will make your website down and steal the information from it. After this attack, you need to build your website and the trust of your customers from the beginning and you will lose money.

3.Redirecting plugins

Your customers will not be happy when the link is broken and you didn’t deal with it. You need a redirecting plugin to deal with the errors that get from all errors in the web world. This plugin will deal with these errors and redirect the customers to other working link.

4.Email plugin

You may need to make email marketing campaign to make your customers aware about your website. So you need to setup an email plugin which can handle this point instead of sending the mail one by one and waste the time.

You need the email plugin to handle the mail list, send mails and deal with the broken emails.

5.Contact form plugin

You need your customers to be in contact with you. you can put the email of yours in the page of contact us or make it more professional as a contact form.

You can use the form plugin in registration process or as a survey for your products. You can use form plugin to generate one by drag & drop. It’s very easy and has man purposes.

6.Image, videos and sliders

We wrote before about gallery plugins which can handle media on your website in manner way. You can use gallery plugins to organize media resources and manipulate them in addition adding them in beautiful way on your pages like slider or putting social media buttons on them to make it easy for sharing.

7. Social media plugins

Social media is an important part in any successful marketing plan for any website or product. You need social media plugins to help you handling this. You can use one of them to add beautiful social media networks buttons in any place you want in the page to make it easy for sharing. These plugins can help you to collect useful statistics about the sharing and the network that your visitors use more.

8. Testing the performance

All you have done was when your website was offline. But now you want to launch it for public then you have to make some important tests to help you know more about the performance of your website. You can use applications like Pingdom and googlepagespeed. You have to be interested in knowing the speed of loading on your website because it’s important for customer acquisition and SEO on search engine.

You need to use cache plugins to speed up your website and there are many cache plugins for free offers features more than you want.

9.Google analytics

The more you know about your website, the more you can improve. You need to know the most amount of information about your website to make the best about improving it. Google Analytics is the easiest way to track how your readers interact with your website. It tells you where your visitors are coming from, what they see on your site, when they leave and how well your site is doing.

10. SEO plugins

You need your customers to find you on search engine website while searching for something. So you need to install SEO plugin to analyse your website and give you the best about improving SEO rank to make more visitors.

11. Compare the approved designs with the template website, reviewing each part with the template in layout, header style, fonts, formatting and content.
12. Check that all images are compressed for web, image quality and image size consistency.
13. Check the license of the images on your website.
14. Check font styles, line height, spacing, leading, imagery, navigation and colors for consistency. If new elements were added during content entry or development, make sure they match the site design style.

15. Website testing on different browsers

1.You need to verify that all forms on the website are working as it should be:

• Submitter should send a mail as a response.
• A thank you page should be followed by the submitter.
• The database received the details from the submitter properly.
• Analytics records the submission as a conversion.

2. You need to ensure uploading files on the website pages without permission errors.
3. Test pages for HTML/CSS errors and compatibility in all major, current browsers on all devices.
4. If there are programmed features, you need to ensure that they are working well as individual and integrated with the whole website.
5. Test performance grades on Google PageSpeed and Pingdom Tools and correct any relevant technical recommendations.

16. Website logo

You must have a unique logo for your website to stand out in the crowded online space. It will help you to build your brand on internet and the people will know you by your logo mainly. You can easily create a simple text logo yourself with an advanced online logo software. These days, there is a slew of logo design services that use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to help you create unique logos in minutes! Most of these are quite affordable too.

17. Contact page test

You have to make sure that the contact page is working well. Not only the visitors can use it but also the contact form is making the suitable response that you need.

18. Taking care of legal stuff

• Take care that required licenses are in place for images, fonts, plugins, etc.
• Consider including a ‘Terms of Service’ to explain your services in detail. Auto Terms of Service and Privacy Policy can help you get started with this.
• In case your website is an ecommerce store or deals with money in any way, you should add a comprehensive ‘Terms and Conditions’ section.
• If you’re collecting data, it’s comforting to users if your Privacy Policy reassures them that their personal details are in good hands. Compliance with the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is necessary, too.
• A cookie warning is a legal requirement in many jurisdictions, so take care to include one.
• Check out the legal requirements in different geographies for age verification, consent requirements, credit card processing and more.

19. Final check

1. Ensure that all third party plugins are working well.
2. Create a list of items not completed at the time of launch. Schedule a meeting to review and prioritize.
3. Backup the whole website before launch. This step enables you to go back the last correct point before anything goes wrong after launch.
4. If there are other domains that your website point to, you need to be sure that you are connected well with them.
5. If there are more people who can assist at launch, you have to be sure that they are available for any emergency and they have the access to the website.
6. Find current DNS information by opening Terminal and dig www.domain.com.
7. Make sure that your images on the website are optimized to speed up your website loading.
8. If your website is going to accept payments, do a test run of each step in the purchase/payment process, including the success page redirect. This includes downloads, sign-ups, shopping cart functions, payment processing, email notifications, buttons, and links.
9. Make different type of search on the website and be sure that the function of  search is working well.
10. Be sure that you set up your permalinks on the website.

After website launch

1. Content and search engine optimization (SEO)

1. Log into Google Analytics and export a CSV file of high traffic pages.
2. Log into Google Search Console and download a CSV file of “your most linked content.”
3. Use SEMrush or a similar tool to export a list of high ranking pages or high traffic pages which may usually be the same for you .
4. Check these three lists and make sure that these pages exist and working fine and also, make sure that the pages with the close rank are working too.
5. Title tags for all pages should meet the following criteria:

• Begin with the target keyphrase followed by the company name (i.e. Keyphrase | Company Name).
• Be unique to each page.
• Include no more than 55 characters including spaces.

6. Meta descriptions should meet the following criteria:

• Include the target keyphrase for the page.
• Be unique to each page.
• Include around 120 characters including spaces.

7. Each page should have headers and subheaders (Heading H1, Heading H2). H1 tags should include the target keyphrase for the page.
8. There should be internal links between pages throughout the site. When relevant, these links should include the target keyphrase of the page it’s linking to.
9. The target keyphrase where relevant should be included inside the body text.

10 Pages should have calls-to-action that guide the visitor toward the desired actions.

11. Images should include alt tags. These should contain simple descriptions of the image and include a target keyphrase when relevant.

2. Content analytics

1. Setup Google analytics.
2. Ensure that you have access to Analytics and have been added to the account in Admin > User Management with full access (Manage Users, Edit, Collaborate, Read & Analyze). If you don’t have full access, request that you be added at this level.
3. Add the Google Analytics code to the website’s config record. You need to remember that  the method of adding Analytics code to the website may vary depending on the content management system.

4.If you want specific customer to access your website, you can use filters by IP of each visitor using google.

5. If the search is applicable on your website, activate it. The “query parameter” for site search features will vary depending on the content management system. It should be visible in the URL when testing your site search tool. In this example, the query parameter is “s.”
6. Link Google Analytics to Google Search Console. In Google Analytics go to Admin > Property Settings and link to your accounts.
7. If the site has an SSL, make sure that “https” is selected for both the Property and View areas in the account.

3. During launch

1.You need to make your website suitable with the server according to the security, SSL, and https

2. If you changed the DNS, you have to test the website and third party applications and ensure that they are working well with the new DNS.

4. Post launch

1. Be sure that google analytics starts to collect the data.
2. Complete the configuration of google search console.
3. In google search console, setup for the domain, submit a new sitemap.xml. Ensure that the new sitemap passes with no errors.
4. After the sitemap passes, select Crawl > Fetch as Google, then enter the domain and click “Fetch and Render.”
5. In the console, you need to set the links that you want to appear in search results pages in searches for your brand.
6. Be sure that the links are working and they aren’t out of index.
7. Check robots.txt file to make sure it is not set to noindex, nofollow.

5. Marketing

1.Schedule more announcements on social media. Typically, one to three shares per network over the space of a week.

2. Add a “check out our new website” link to your email signature for the next two weeks.

We hope that you can launch your website safely after this checklist which gives you all what you need to launch a WordPress website.