tips for launching a new website

Launching a new website is always exciting, you’ve thought and worked hard on that dazzling design, awesome content, and outstanding user interface and rightly very proud.

Now is the time to unleash it on the web and in this post, we’ll give our top 5 recommendations for launching a new site from a marketing and metrics setup perspective. This won’t just help with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), but also on traffic generation, accessibility, and your ability to measure and improve everything about your site.

All sounds a bit daunting but don’t worry — our web gurus have explained the core activities for your site to be in perfect condition when you launch it.

• Install Google Analytics – This is very important because it allows you to track insights on your website visitors. Even if you were tracking data on your old website, you’ll need to set up analytics again on your new website.
• Install Google webmaster tools – This is another great free tool offered by Google. Webmaster tools provides information about the health of your website. They do this while their crawlers are on your site and also notify you of any issues regarding your search engine rankings.
• 301 Redirects – By getting a new website it’s almost certain that your URL structure will change. The old links will now take users to a blank page which is not good for any one. If this is the case you will want to use a 301 redirect. So people visiting the old links will be redirected to the new ones.
• Create a new sitemap and submit it to all search engines – A sitemap is simply a listing of all the webpages and URLs on your website. Once your new website is live it is recommended that you create a new sitemap and submit it to Google using the webmaster tools.
• Double check all links – Before you publish the website be sure to double check that all of your links are pointing to the correct places. You can use this tool to scan your website for broken links.

Obviously this is not an exhaustive list of everything you could do. At Silvertoad we take things several steps further and cover additional checklists when developing and launching new client sites.

We often come across DIY sites that have been created using one of the online web platforms and these are always lacking optimisation (often due to the platform limitations or because the system providers charge extra for the basics you need, which people then don’t do). As with everything, you get what you pay for and whilst the temptation of a £20 a month deal for a website may seem great, the reality is, you are not giving yourself the best chance of being found online and worse, if you’ve used a platform online, you don’t even own your own site!

Check your options fully before committing to a self-build on an online platform and the best advice we can give you is, call us for a chat before going ahead with anything, we’ll happily advise you the best option and things to look out for!

Get in touch today if you’d like us to help supercharge your online presence with our enhanced online marketing & SEO services.

Silvertoad offer the full range of website design services as well as online marketing solutions.

Our talented in-house website design team allows us to help you with any project, no matter what the size, complexity or requirement you may have.

About us:

Silvertoad, based in Luton, Bedfordshire, provides a wide range of website design and development services, graphic design and printing solutions and a host of other marketing services.

Interested in taking your marketing to the next level? Feel free to contact our friendly customer services team to discuss how we can help you! Call us on 0800 756 6800 or email us at [email protected].