10 Things You Need to Do Immediately After Your Website Launch

It takes a lot of work to get a website up and running. We have to design it, create content for it, and get it functional. Every step of the way can be time-consuming and costly. So, it’s only natural if after the website launch, we feel a sense of accomplishment, like it’s finally done. What if we then found out it was just the beginning? Yes, there are more things to do after finishing our site before it’s totally ready. Luckily, website marketing and maintenance is as simple as doing these 10 things.

1. Back up your site

The first step is a piece of cake. Since we don’t want to lose all the hard work we put in, we’ll need to install a backup plugin to our website. Backups keep us from losing our design, as well as image and text content in the case of crashes or hacks. A backup can save you from a world of frustration down the line.

2. Do a speed test

After our website is ready, we need to check if it loads quickly. Why? Not only will a fast loading site keep our visitors focused on our content, it also helps our ranking. Google values load speed as part of the user experience. This means we have to keep load time down on all devices to 5 seconds or lower.

3. Set up Analytics

After we’ve prepared our site for visitors, we want to see how they use it so we can continuously improve. How long do they stay? How many pages do they click through before exiting? Google Analytics can track all this data and more. To set it up, we create an account, set up our property (website), and select how we want to see the data reported on the dashboard.

4. Create and submit a sitemap

The first step to getting our site on Google is asking them to index it —to add it to their database. We can do this by submitting a sitemap, a file that lists all our URLs. This tells Google “here’s what our site is about” so that Google can recommend it. If we built our site with WordPress, the process is as simple as installing a sitemap plugin. Otherwise, we can create one manually.

5. Plan your content

To bring in and engage traffic on our site, we’ll plan out how we’ll be sharing content in the future. This means creating a content plan. First, we’ll use tools like Google Keyword Planner to find relevant keywords with high search and low competition. Next we’ll define when to publish this content and how often we’ll check its performance.

6. Set up your social media

After website launch, we want our content and brand to be seen outside of our website and bring people in to learn more. One way to get your content out there is to set up social media profiles. Before starting every type of account, we need to find out which ones are better for our type of business and target audience. It’s best if we create profiles on relevant networks and consider using a content scheduling app to save time posting.

8. Start monitoring uptime and downtime

Once our website is up, we expect it to be available at all times, right? That doesn’t always happen though, so when it’s down we want to be in the know. We can get notified by setting up a monitor to inform us of when our site is up or down.

9. Plan maintenance

The health of our website is much like that of our body. Even though everything seems okay, it’s better to get regular check-ups.  For our site, this means having scheduled maintenance weekly, monthly, and yearly. Here are some things to look for during checks.

10. Promote

If we’re the only ones that know our website launched, we might end up being the only ones that visit it. To spread the word, we can look at options such as running ads for website marketing on Google and social. If we want even more attention, we can even share our website launch with a press release.

Takeaways

Clearly, our website launch comes with a hefty to-do list. The upside of this list is that it’s easy to go through, replicable, and will be beneficial in the long run. Now that you know what to do with your own website marketing, start tackling these items and you’ll have website visitors in no time.