Note: The plugin and site recommendations in this article are for WordPress users, but the overall list can be used as a general guide for any web platform.

Optimize Your Images

High-quality images should be used on your website as they are an important piece to the storytelling part of your business. However, they need to be properly optimized prior to uploading them so that they can be seen on mobile devices without slowing down your site’s overall page load time.

Secure Your Website With An SSL Certificate

If you don’t have an SSL certificate for your website, please get one before you do anything else. Businesses and organizations need an SSL certificate on their website to protect online transactions as well as the privacy and security of customer information. The SSL ensures the security of the Internet connection and prevents criminals from reading or modifying the information transmitted between the two systems.

Without an SSL certificate, chrome will identify your website as unsecure and notify every user that comes into contact with it. The last thing you want to do is cancel yourself out by not having a secure website.

Double, and triple-check for Broken Links

Broken links are like lost business opportunities. When someone hits a broken link on your website, they’ll most likely be redirected to an Error 404 page. Broken links also stop search engines from properly indexing the pages on your website and lower your site’s search engine ranking score.

Best Resources for checking broken links:

Broken Link Check

Crawly

Google Analytics

Download and Activate the Yoast SEO Plugin

With over a million downloads, Yoast SEO is by far the best WordPress plugin available at the moment. This plugin allows you to optimize and create custom titles, meta descriptions, and keywords for posts, pages, and taxonomies. Yoast SEO also gives you a preview so you can see exactly how your post will look when someone searches for it.

Add Wordfence Firewall Plugin

A secure website helps you to build trust and strengthen loyalty with your customers. Wordfence is a free plugin that works to keep your website safe and secure.

Use Caching

Caching your website often is one way to help with your website’s speed without sacrificing anything in the process. W3 Total Cache is a great plugin option for my WordPress users out there.

Set Up Google Analytics w/ Monster Insights

Google Analytics is a great tool to have in your box because it’s free and one of the best resources to help you understand how your website is doing. Google Analytics provides a ton of data such as the number of visitors, most viewed content, how long visitors are staying on your website, etc.  Google Analytics is free for anyone to use and can be used on various web builder platforms. If you’re using WordPress, MonsterInsights is a great plugin to help integrate Google Analytics with your dashboard.

Backup Your Website

Backing up your site allows you to restore the site back to a previous version in case something goes wrong. We keep our site backed up through GoDaddy but some other good plugins that will help you backup your website if you aren’t using Godaddy are:

JetPack

WP Time Capsule

BackUpWordpress

Run Tests On Everything

You don’t want to go into your launch blind and not know if everything works. We recommend that you check all of the forms, links, buttons, and menus. You also want to remember to test out any payment systems you have in place and make sure all user roles have been properly assigned. 

We hope that this list helps you launch a kick-ass website that is responsive and aesthetically pleasing. Please share a link to your website in the comments below for some feedback and a little love in return for making it to the end of this post.