Building A Website: 4 Important Checks Before You Go Live

Taking a website online is a big moment in any business. However, if you fail to plan and prepare for problems, it will be a rough ride. Here are four all-important tips that can help you go live with a website that performs properly.

Ensure Accessibility

Before you take your website online, and as a part of regular maintenance, you need to ensure your pages and documents are accessible. If visitors have problems when trying to access different web pages or documentation on your site, it can reflect negatively on your business. There are tools to help you get it right on day one, and maintain website functionality.

This website accessibility checker is perfect for the job. ADScan from AbleDocs can scan both internal and external websites and your document repositories to ensure that all your pages and pdfs are functioning properly and are accessible to visitors. This process can also be automated, and provide reports on your site that can help you to make it even more functional and offer extra value to customers.

Install Analytics

The data your website generates is a potential goldmine. As visitors use and interact with your site, they are creating data that can help you to identify problems before they happen, or areas you can expand into to provide your users with more value from their experience. You should have analytical tools installed from day one to help you monitor and evaluate your website’s performance.

Google provides free analytical tools, but these operate at a bare minimum. To harness the full power of the data your website generates, you will have to find software that gives you more in-depth analysis and also provides you with the tools you need to refine and adjust your site using the information you harvest from the data.

Prepare For All Platforms

More browsers, more problems. Though every web browser on every device reads the same pages, they do it in different ways and present the information on them differently. Your website needs to be able to handle connections from a range of different web browsers, including the big three of Google Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge.

It is not just browsers either. Smartphone web browsing is one of the primary routes for consumers to find and investigate websites, especially in eCommerce. These connections can come through links posted on social media and may use that social media app’s in-built browser. Your site needs to be legible and presentable across all these platforms from day one.

Timing Is Everything

Even with your website and document repositories fully checked and ready to go live, things can still go wrong. Hosting servers can be temperamental, especially with a new site. The best time to go live is at the start of the week.

Making your website accessible on a Thursday or Friday is not recommended. You want to have the full tech support team available in the early days to help keep your site online. Try to schedule a Monday morning as your day one. This will give you a full working week to check, test, and maintain your site before the weekend.

Take these steps to enjoy a reliable and accessible website. Give yourself plenty of time to solve problems in the early days, and complete lots of testing before you go live. The quality of your website will affect the success of your business.