After investing a great deal of time and money developing a custom WordPress website, forgetting small details could be a disaster that ends up having a negative effect on your site performance, dataloss, functionality, SEO ranking or paid advertising cost. If you have had your web site professionally created it’s still a good idea to double check things are done correctly.
Here is a list of checks to perform when developing a WordPress site that is about to go live:
WordPress Basics:
- !Important – Setup an automatic backup plugin to a remote location (we recommend Updraft) and Double check backups are saving.
- Set the timezone – Settings > General
- Set Language to English – Settings > General
- Check / Set admin email address – Settings > General
- Systematically browse through the site looking for broken links, missing links or dummy content. If it is a large site use a plugin like Broken Link Checker
- Check all Social Links are correct
- Check that Email and contact links are working and going to the correct address
- Any Lorem Ipsum on the site?
- Browse the site with Debug on and fix any errors
- Check site loading speed, (Chrome developer tools > network, should be less than 2MB). Check all images, use JPGs where possible, PNGs only for transparency. Possible to use GIFs if PNGs are too big (lower quality).
- Setup Monitoring & Downtime alerts. (We recommend Statuscake.com)
- Make sure contact form emails are backing up to the database. Gravity forms does this by default.
Spam:
- Activate an Anti-spam plugin such as Akismet.
- Is your Hello World post and sample page deleted? These are often targeted by spammers posting comments.
- If using Gravity Forms, turn on Akismet. Forms->Settings page and mark the “Akismet Integration” option as “Yes”.
Browser Testing:
Depending on your audience this will vary but here are the essential browsers and sizes to test. Chrome is usually used to build the sites so no testing is necessary.
- IE Edge :(
- Firefox
- Safari
- iPad size
- Laptop browser size. Very wide and narrow.
- Mobile device (both apple & Android)
Blog:
- Test Paging for when there are a lot of posts
- Test search results page
- Test Comments
Extras:
- Add a favicon
- Test subscribe Forms
- Share button testing
- Turn off debug mode
- Check the any domain aliases are linked
- Tidy Admin menu and dashboard if possible
- Inspect JS for errors
- Enable SSL – Inspect for SSL errors
Security, we recommend the iThemes Security Plugin:
In Global Settings >
- Uncheck the box next to “Send digest email” to cut down on notification emails. Uncheck “Enable Email Lockout Notifications” – Or you will be bombarded with notifications.
- Verify that your email address is correct.
- Add my current IP to the White List
- Make sure the “Email Contacts” are going to you
- If you get permissions error reset paths in global settings – Path to Log Files
- Turn off DB backups. Use Updraft!
- Sign up for Network Brute Force Protection API Key
- Save Settings at the base of Network Brute Force Protection
Basic SEO:
- Add Yoast SEO Plugin – Bulky but still the best.
- Make a nice homepage title at least. Continue with other pages as needed.
- Check page title in code
- If it’s a rebuild you may need some 301 Redirects.
- Upload Facebook image to Yoast for homepage and check in developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/
- Check other versions of the domain are 301 redirecting. www | http
Things to do just before you go live:
- Create analytics and webmaster tools and add tracking
- Create XML Sitemaps and submit to Google when doing SEO
- Fetch as Google in webmaster tools. Crawl > Fetch as Google
- Settings > Reading > UNTICK Discourage search engines from indexing site. Or never tick this in the first place.
Final checks after going live:
- Check backups are working OK
- Check email forms again.
- Verify emails in general, are working normally.
