WordPress Checklist

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 (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.

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!
• Signup 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 home page 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 home page 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.