How To Tell If Your Website is Ready For Launch

We work with designers, developers, and agencies every day. We’ve seen the pitfalls and possibilities of managing a large site or multiple websites for many clients. Websites can gain popularity quickly or fade into obscurity even faster. What makes the difference? We’ve found a strategic website launch can help you build a foundation for the future success of your site.

Get Your Website Strategy In Order

It’s easy to start a website. Everything you need is before you. Hosting is widely available and highly affordable, and the world’s best content management system is free and easy to install.

Anyone can create a website – but then what? Just because it’s easy to create a website doesn’t mean it’s easy to keep a profitable website. Having a website means you need to pay attention and provide an answer to many important questions, including:

• What’s my ideal audience?
• How often should I update the site content?
• What kind of security protocol do I have in place?
• What service is my website providing?

There are easily hundreds of questions you can ask yourself, but these are good questions to start with. Without answering these basic questions first you may find yourself struggling to keep your site relevant over the first few difficult months.

Determine Your Ideal Audience

There’s no secret here. You need to do the market research required to know who you are selling to or who you want to read your content. But it’s not as difficult as it sounds. You must have at least a rough sketch or a few “personas” in mind of who will be the ideal consumer of your content. If not, consider having a long brainstorming session in which you can generate some ideas and jot them down. The more specific you can get the better.

Content Strategy

You will need to make sure you have a sensible strategy for keeping your site content fresh and relevant to your brand. Most sites have a blogging module, where their readers can follow along via an RSS feed or through their various social media accounts.

If you decide to have a blog, how often will you post? You should try for at least once a week.

Remember social media counts as content as well. Are you scheduling posts in advance? If not, you may be taking more work on yourself than necessary. Since you’re in the pre-launch phase, you should consider loading up your content calendar in advance. This will create more work in the initial period but will certainly lighten your load once you’ve launched the site and your aim shifts toward maintenance and longevity.

Security Concerns

Is your site vulnerable to attack? (All sites are.) Is your data safe? These are all important concerns you will carry with you along the journey of maintaining and updating your site over the long term, but you can take advantage of your pre-launch time to address certain concerns early.

At the very least, you should make sure you have scheduled backups with a WordPress backup plugin. This way, if anything unexpected should happen (which, of course, it will), you have a backup ready to recover your site.

Establish Your WEBSite’s Purpose and Goal

If you’ve used BoldGrid to create your site, you know first hand how easy it is to craft a beautiful web presence. But no matter how good-looking your site is, there needs to be a purpose and a goal.

How does the goal of your site fit into your long term strategy? Is your site traffic going to turn into sales conversions? Will your blog readers purchase your eBook? This is a decision for you to make. And we’d advise you have it all figured it out before launch.

Also bear in mind, your site will naturally grow over time if you’ve taken care to develop and improve your message. Your initial 100 readers may turn into 1,000 and climb gradually up to 10,000. Is your hosting account able to handle that kind of volume? Remember your WordPress-powered BoldGrid site is scalable, which means it grows with your business.

Once you feel comfortable with your level of preparation, your site is ready for launch. Your work is far from done, but you’ve taken some important big steps and created a foundation you can build upon.