Now that you’ve learned the basics of Growth Driven Design (GDD) and become a pro at this dynamic approach to website design, you are ready to launch your new site right? Wrong. Keep in mind that even though the GDD methodology suggests a “shortened” launch time, you want to properly prepare for it and make sure you're not throwing all that hard work out the door. In this week's blog, we thought it would be valuable at this stage to share a great Hubspot post we've found that covers 14 essential actions you need to consider before taking that baby live. These are cruical steps in ensuring your new website is a success.
One of the 14 major steps in preparing to go live with your new website is testing. The Hubspot post talks about testing site speed and double checking your images. See below an excerpt from the article:
Site speed (i.e., the time it takes to load each webpage) influences user experience, conversion rate, and even search engine ranking ever since Google made page load time a web search ranking factor back in 2010.
Use a site speed tester like Google PageSpeed Insights to see a broad picture of your website's load speed. If you're a HubSpot customer and want to see page speed of individual URLs, log in to your account and go to content > website > select a page > optimization tab.
Check that all the images on your site are compressed properly for the web, as this will help with page load time. (If you use HubSpot to upload your site's images, you don't need to worry -- images uploaded to HubSpot's software are automatically compressed. Otherwise, tools like TinyPNG will help you reduce file size.)
Check that all your images are consistent in quality and size, too. Be sure all your images have alt text, as that's how search engines will be able to identify and index your images.
There's plenty more to test – plus some other important items you need to consider before going live to the public. To get up to speed with the rest of this list check out the original post: The Website Launch Checklist: 14 Things You Need to Review Before Going Live.
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