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Essential WordPress Website Launch Checklist

There’s no question that WordPress is a massively popular platform for publishing a website. As the WordPress community grows, there’s an ever-increasing array of features, plugins and themes to choose from. But what should be in your final round of checks before you unleash your WordPress website to the world? Here are 6 top items that you must check before launching your WordPress website.

1. Is the domain name easy to remember? – If you’re just about to launch, checking the domain name is a bit of a last minute consideration… perhaps you should have already picked a good domain name. However, a small part of your websites success will be a good URL, so ensure that it’s easy to remember and that typos are not common. Trying to fix this after launch will be considerable hassle for you.

2. Set the Site Title and Tagline – Another simple faux-pas is to forget to change the default website name and tagline (on the Settings -> General page in WP Admin). Since the defaults are instantly recognisable, not changing them leaves you looking unprofessional. Make sure you change them to something matching your website topic.

3. Update the timezone to your local timezone – (on the Settings -> General page in WP Admin). Updating the timezone means that the date and time on any posts that you publish, make sense to the audience you are targeting with your website. Having the correct timezone also allows you to target the optimal reading times for your blog by using scheduled posts. If you don’t use the post/blog feature, the timezone setting is less important.

4. Delete the Hello World comment – (Comments -> and look for the ‘Mr WordPress’ comment). Leaving any test comments on your blog looks a little unprofessional too, so make sure you delete them.

5. Install and configure Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin – (search for ‘Yoast WordPress SEO’ when adding a new plugin within WordPress) This plugin is currently the best plugin for customising the SEO settings for your website. Explaining how to use the plugin is beyond the scope of this article, but use it to do at least the following:

Create appropriate SEO titles that put your page/post title first (to help with your website rankings in search engines)
Set up XML sitemaps for your website (so all pages can be found by search engines)
Clean up your <head></head> area (which speeds up your website)
Set up meta descriptions for all of your pages (good descriptions improve click-thrus from search engines)
Prevent author and date-based archives from being indexed (to prevent your site being stung for duplicated content)

6. Allow websites to index the website – (Settings -> Privacy -> Allow search engines to index this site.). So many web developers forget about this setting, but make sure you allow search engines to include you. Otherwise you’ll not be found on the search engines!

Good Luck! I wish you the best of luck with your new website!

Dan Harrison runs WP Doctors – a UK WordPress agency specialising in Custom WordPress Plugin Development. Dan has been working with WordPress for over 6 years, which is a very long time in Internet years!