10 Things to Do After Launching Your New WordPress Website

When we (or anyone else for that matter) launch a fresh WordPress website there are a multitude of things that need to be done. As a digital development agency we have processes and quality assurances that allow us to deliver high end websites with real confidence that everything you need to succeed is in hand.

But, if you are doing WordPress developments or site building yourself, here are 10 things we think you should sort out either pre-launch or right away.

1. Get your website indexed, ensure your SEO is configured correctly

A website that can’t be found is no good at all. It’s important to have an SEO plugin installed on your website, which will extend WordPress to give you significantly more options to configure how your site will index. We recommend plugins such as Yoast SEO and Smartcrawl Pro.

SEO plugins such as these will give you a multitude of options to help shape how your website will appear in search engine results, allowing you to modify metadata and schema on a page by page basis.

There are more advanced options, which allow you to selectively not index pages or categories, and even tailor how your content will appear in previews shared on social media.
Perhaps the most important setting of all though, is to make absolutely sure that you are allowing the site to be indexed. Head to settings, then ‘reading’ and ensure that the ‘discourage search engines from indexing this site’ tick box remains unticked. If you have an SEO plugin it’ll helpfully flag if there’s a problem here!

2. Connect to Google Analytics and Google Search Console, check redirects

Make sure you have Google Analytics (GA4) set up correctly and search console up and running. This will provide you with really valuable data to help you understand how the site is performing and help shape your marketing efforts. If there are any issues with how your site is indexing, Google Search Console will report this to you via email so you can take action.

If this is replacing an old site, it’s vital to ensure that you put in place redirects to ensure that users don’t hit a 404 on your new site. For example if on your old site your services page was `our-services` and on the new site it is `services`, if users click on that old URL (either if they’ve bookmarked it or it is indexed in a google search result) they will hit a 404 page. This is not only annoying for your user but may have a detrimental effect on your SEO ranking.

Hopefully you had a plan to redirect content before the site went live, but after the fact a quick way to check what is indexed from your old site is to do a google search for your domain with the `site:` search operator. This will allow you to make absolutely sure that your redirects are working for any indexed content.

If you haven’t set up redirects at all yet, SEO plugins have a redirection functionality but the Redirection plugin is also a very good alternative. 

3. Make sure you have a sitemap

An xml sitemap file helps search engines like Google to better understand and organise your site’s content. If you have an SEO plugin installed, this will include the ability to both generate but also finesse what appears in your sitemap, giving you the ability to to omit certain content from your sitemap if you wanted to. 

4. Improve Your Website Speed

Nobody likes a slow website, whether that’s a human user or a search engine deciding where to send traffic. Here are some stats to support that:

Source: Google (https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and-mobile/mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks/) 

Optimising your website is a huge topic but there are some broad steps you can take:

Utilise a caching plugin. 

Optimise your images – consider using lazy loading of images and modern image formats such as webp.

Minify your site’s code.

Ensure that you aren’t loading superfluous styles and scripts.

Consider your content strategy. If you have design features such as autoplaying video this is going to have a detrimental effect on page speed score. 

You can use Google Pagespeed Insights to check the performance of your site and action any recommendations, as well as using a carbon tool to check the carbon impact of your site.

5. Use a CDN, Beware Bots

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) like Cloudflare can dramatically speed up your website, especially when used in tandem with other strategies such as server caching and WordPress caching plugins.  A CDN is a layer that sits in between your user’s browser and your server.  It caches your site’s data on multiple servers, ensuring users access the site from the closest location, improving load times globally.

Beyond this, Cloudflare provides an array of other useful tools, including security protection and bot protection. 
Another consideration is hardening contact forms against bots, we recommend adding a Captcha to contact forms. We’ve recently been using Cloudflare’s Turnstile for this but Google ReCaptcha has historically been the go-to option.

6. Accessibility

One key area that many websites forget to take into consideration is accessibility.

We do our best to make sure that sites we build adhere to as many of the WCAG AA accessibility criteria as possible, making websites that:

Ensuring compatibility with screen readers. It is important to have Aria labelling on elements that have no textual content to ensure that these can be interpreted by those using screen readers. A great example of this is a ‘hamburger’ menu – whilst visually it is a defacto web standard that people ordinarily knows this will do, Aria labelling is really helpful for those using a screen reader – both to explain what the element is and what it will do.

Have sufficient colour contrast, this ensures that people with impaired vision have the best chance of interpreting your website. You can check your colour contrast with a tool such as this: https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

Ensuring websites are as much as possible keyboard navigable – this allows users who aren’t able to use a mouse to still interact with the site using tabbed navigation. Interactive elements should have a clear focus state to show they can be interacted with.

7.  Make your website secure

Online security is imperative. Plugins are available to provide protection from hackers and malware. We use Defender for this purpose. It gives you a variety of options for how to secure your site, including locking out bots, enforcing 2FA for your users, and the ability to block known malicious IP addresses, and periodic malware scanning and reporting.Beyond this, the common sense approach applies. Be sure to regularly audit who has access to your website. Regularly update your and your users passwords, reminding your users to select strong passwords.

Whilst plugins can be great, unfortunately not all plugins are created equally. Sometimes plugins made by less reputable developers can be inherently insecure. Sometimes otherwise good plugins can have vulnerabilities uncovered which can make your site vulnerable.

This is why it is vitally important to both keep your plugins updated and also to thoroughly audit any plugin that you add to your site. It is important to establish a plugins update cycle for your site.

8. Have a backup strategy

Imagine your website disappearing overnight. Actually, don’t! Regular backups are essential. Your hosting provider should offer frequently scheduled backups which are stored off site. This means that if something goes wrong, you would be able to revert to an earlier version of the site.

9. Keep Content Fresh

Search engines love fresh content, so set out a content plan that looks at refreshing page content, adding blogs and more to the website over the coming weeks and months. This will all help to build organic search visibility and, ultimately traffic to the website.

10. Ensure you have an ongoing retainer

Maintaining a website is time-consuming, so you should certainly be investing in a maintenance package. This will cover updates for the site, its plug-ins and any other changes you might need to do to keep the site up to date.

While launching your website is a major milestone, keeping it secure, fast, and updated is essential to building its success for the future. 

If you’d like us to help with this then just get in touch over on our contact page.