Don’t Miss A Step With Your eCommerce Application Launch With This Checklist

You’ve figured out everything for your eCommerce website from the product you’ll be selling to the template and logo for your website down to every last product description. You are ready to hit the go button and launch your eCommerce application, but you’re nervous you may have missed a step.

This feeling is completely understandable; with so many things to stay on top of with the launch of an eCommerce application, sometimes human error comes into play and mistakes are missed. That’s why this checklist will walk you through everything you need to prepare before setting your website to go live.

Writing

There are few things worse than having a glaring typo on your live website that you didn’t notice before. This is why it’s important to go through any text listed anywhere on your website and make sure that there aren’t any misspellings, grammar errors, or typos. This means checking product descriptions, buttons, navigation, page names, etc. Checking for typos and errors is difficult to do by yourself; you often will miss errors in your own writing. If you don’t already have a staff to help you with your business, recruit someone you trust to help you go through the website’s text.

Next, check that you’ve optimized all of your images. This includes web design checks to make sure they aren’t excessively large (which will cause your website to slow down), but also that their titles and alt-text (including captions and descriptions) are optimized for the website.

Web Design

The first thing to check for eCommerce application is to make sure your website performance is optimized. A slow website is going to dramatically affect the customer’s experience. Google has an online tool that allows you to test your site speed and make recommendations to increase your website performance (keep in mind that a slow site speed can negatively impact your search engine rankings). Next, if you have made your website responsive to mobile devices, make sure that the mobile version of your website is working properly.

Then, check your eCommerce application on a variety of different web browsers (Google Chrome, FireFox, Safari, etc.) to make sure it is compatible across the board. Once you’ve check compatibility, take a fine tooth comb through your website to check fonts. Sometimes font can be affected in a template or font codes can alter how letters look, so make sure the formatting is how you want it. Last but certainly not least, triple check every avenue of your website navigation. Check every possible journey throughout every possible page of your website to make sure that you have equal access to other pages from any page of the website.

Web Development

Go through your website and test each of your URLs; you can do this by navigating throughout each page to ensure that they all work properly, or by using an online tool to test it for you (Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool is a great resource). With a larger site that has more than 500 different URLs, you will most likely have to use a paid resource. An excellent resource to take advantage of to keep your web development in check is the Google Search Console. Google will let you know when anything goes wrong on your site so that you can quickly fix it.

Search Engine Optimization

First, go through all your pages and make sure each one has a unique title tag as well as a unique meta description. If you are using an analytics tool through your eCommerce platform or you have Google Analytics working on your site, it’s critical to make sure either is working prior to launch in order to get accurate data. Next, check the icons that you have to integrate your social media throughout your website; test each one to ensure that each icon goes to the correct social media platform. Lastly, if you are planning to run any PPC campaigns, double check that they are ready to go prior to launch.

Network Settings

The first part of network settings is checking monitoring; utilize a site monitor to regularly check pages to ensure they are readily available for website visitors. Then, check the server’s backup system. It’s vital to make sure that if the server goes down, the backup server is properly set in place. Next, test the traffic loads. You won’t know how your site handles heavy traffic until it happens, but there are tools that will test traffic load on the different pages of your website to make sure they can handle it. Finally, check your security. This means if you have any pages that can only be accessed by login credentials, make sure that only by using the login credentials, the pages can be viewed. You also need to check your security certificate to ensure that eCommerce visitors payment information is properly protected.

That’s it! Now that you are through the checklist and everything is set in place, you are ready to launch your eCommerce application. Have any questions? Leave them in the comments and a professional digital agency will jump in and answer!