If you’ve recently launched a new website for your business, I am here to give you a virtual high-five and congratulations!

You’ve taken a big step to starting or refreshing your online presence and that deserves to be recognized. But now that it’s live, do you find yourself asking, “what now?”

Websites are the hub of the customer experience online and while having a new or refreshed website is crucial to connecting with customers, it is the first of many steps that you can take to create the best online experience for your visitors.

We no longer live in the time of set and forget websites and there are a vast number of opportunities to improve your online experience after your website is launched. With that in mind, here are the items you need to address now that your website is live:

Check & Re-Check All Content and Links

Now that you’ve put all that hard work into creating a shiny new website, your team should put the time in to check all links and content before launch. Whether you split up by sections of the website or all take a look at multiple pages, just ensure your links are working, especially on your main web pages.

As far as content goes, check for lorem ipsum and more – did all of your content get populated? If so, did it get populated in the right places? No matter how visually appealing the new site is, holder text and outdated content will not impress your web visitors.

In addition, look for broken links that may have come up since your launch. This is a regular practice, and we’ll address it further a little bit later in this article.

Check Images

Your website visitors are visual learners. They want to see beautiful photos and graphics, that help to convey your message. With that said, you need to make sure that all of your images are properly placed, optimized, and tagged.

Image Selection & Placement

Your article needs an image that has the same subject as your article. If you would use an image just to use an image and get a green bullet in our SEO plugin, you are doing it wrong. The image should reflect the topic of the post, or have illustrative purposes within the article, of course.

Optimizing Images

Loading times are important for UX and SEO. The faster the site, the easier to visit and index a page is. Images can have a huge impact on loading times, especially when you load a huge image and show it really small, like using a 2500×1500 pixels image and showing it at 250×150 pixels size. The entire image still has to be loaded. Scale the image to the size you want to show it. WordPress helps by providing the image in multiple sizes after upload already.

Image Alt Tags

The alt text (or alt tags) is added to an image so there will be a descriptive text when the image for whatever reason can’t be displayed to the visitor.

Be sure to add alt texts. Make sure the alt text includes the SEO keyword for that page and relates to / describes the image.

Make Sure Your Site is Responsive & Accessible

There’s no way for you to know what browser or device types may stumble across your website. So, you need to be prepared for all of them. The answer to this is to make sure that you have created a responsive website from the start. But going forward, you need to make sure that pages you’ve added are still accessible and responsive to all browser types and devices.

Google has a great Mobile Friend Test, here: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly

Check Your Search Engine Optimization

After launch, take a thorough look at your web analytics to see what organic search terms visitors are using to find your site.

Do this on a weekly basis at the very least. Also, take time to identify opportunities where you could rank high on search engines for topics your company and employees are experts on, and then create relevant content related those topics.

Launching a website that is search engine accessible and optimized for priority keywords is only half the battle. After your website is live the real SEO work begins with reporting on search engine optimization performance indicators such as:

• Organic traffic: the volume traffic is coming to your website from search engines
• Organic traffic keywords: the keywords are visitors using to land on your site
• Organic traffic performance: use metrics like bounce rate, pages per session and time one site to analyze the performance of visitors who land on your site from organic traffic
• Individual keyword rankings: the keywords that your site currently ranking for
• Organic traffic conversion rates: measure if the visitors that come to your site through organic traffic are converting or taking action once they land on your site

Create an Editorial Calendar

After your website is live, you still need to be on top of adding new content to the website. Use the analytics that we discussed earlier to map out topics that you and your team need to write about, based on the keywords you want to rank for.

It’s best to create this calendar (at least the next 90 days) in the week’s immediately following your website launch at the very latest. If this was a redesign of a current website, then you should do this prior to launching.

Schedule Follow Up Quality Assurance Meetings

Once the day to day grind goes back to normal for your business, it can be easy to ‘set it, and forget it’ when it comes to re-checking the quality of your website. So, it’s best to put these reminders and meetings in your schedule now so that you will set the appropriate time aside to review the website. Maybe your outbound links have broken, or a new group of keywords need to be addressed. Whatever the reason, these quality meeting will help you stay in front of any potential problems.

Conclusion

Now it’s your turn! What measures and steps have you taken upon launching your website? Let us know in the comments, or tweet to us at @AgintoSolutions.