Website Launch Strategy 101: Pre-Launch

Planning a website launch strategy can be nerve-wracking to say the least. 

There are hundreds of ways to take a website that you’re planning to release and make sure your launch strategy is a success.

Here are just a few you should make part of your checklist.

• Setup a Pre-launch page

If you’re launching a new domain, setting up a landing or holding page is a great way of helping you drum up traffic and excitement about your site before it goes live. 

You can even set up a mailing list signup on the page to capture those people who want to be told when your site is released.

• Have your initial content written

To get the new site ranking for SEO, and to make it appear active and interesting to your audiences, make sure you’ve written 5-10 pieces of content around the main topics your business covers. 

You can build a more detailed content strategy later, but establishing a bedrock of general content pieces will help you drive traffic and rank for SEO.

• Test everything 

And then test it again.

Your web agency will have their own internal testing but their team will only be able to test using their own perspective – you should be sharing the site internally with your colleagues and with some trusted customers before it goes live to ensure that it meets with everybody’s needs.

• Prepare a social media strategy for the launch

If your company has a team of 30, every single one of that team should be posting about the site on as many different platforms as they can. Getting them all engaged can be a challenge but it’s important.

LinkedIn is a must (and ahead of your launch it’s always good to check in on your business’s page best practices) , but if you can convince your teams to share the new website from your social posts on Facebook and Instagram (depending upon your business sector) then this is even better.

• Work out what your Viral Piece will be

What piece of content will get people talking when your website launches? Have you got a huge resource of expertise related to your business sector that you can share? Can you get dozens of industry contacts of yours linking to and sharing a piece of useful content from your site?

The idea of a ‘Big Rock’ to promote a new site is not a new one, but can achieve serious results when used correctly, especially if your business is B2B.

• Check on the rest of your technical setup

Is it five years since anyone last talked to your IT partner? It’s probably best to check in before you go live.

When website hosting changes, one of the most common issues that businesses can face is that all of their emails stop sending, receiving – or working altogether! 

This outage on day one can be disastrous, so make sure your website partners are fully clued in on your current technical setup.

• Make sure you’ve got the rights to use your website images

If you don’t already know about your image rights, make sure you go through your images before you launch. Making a song and dance about a new site will leave a really sour taste if the incorrect usage of an image catches up with you.

• Add your website to Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free platform for anyone with a website to monitor how Google views their website. It provides tools to help you view any referring domains, assess your mobile site performance, understand your rich search results, and see your highest-traffic queries and pages.

It will be essential in helping you achieve strong SEO as you grow your site after  launch, and adding it can help avoid any disjoint for Google if you are moving from an old to a new site.

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There are plenty of other ways to make sure your website launch strategy will be as successful as possible, but these are some of the most important.

If you’re thinking about what to do on launch day itself we’ve got the blog for you – access the website launch day blog below. 

Read the blog