Releasing a website is a stressful and important moment. And you want to make sure everything is ready.
Below, find my definitive checklist to cross before releasing a website!
- Opquast 🥖 It is a French organization, and they defined a list of best practices for web development. They are not well-known on the English internet, I think. But I strongly recommend you take a look at their Best Practices. Most of them are common sense. And they are pretty exhaustive covering everything aspect.
- Lighthouse ⛯ If you don't know yet, it is an audit tool. Open your website with Chrome. Press F12, click on Lighthouse, and Generate Report. It is free and fully automated. You will get a very detailed review of your website with a lot of suggestions for improvements and fixes.
- GiftOfSpeed ⚡ Lighthouse should have picked it up already, but double-checking that you have activated GZip or Brotli text compression on your web server will not hurt.
- achecker.ca 👨🦯 This website is for analyzing the accessibility of your website. Don't forget about your color-blind and visually impaired visitors. It will also help bots to index your website and rank up your SEO.
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W3C Validators ✅ If you use one of the common JS front-end frameworks you may not pass the validation because they tend to add a lot of non-standard code in your HTML. But do not worry, it is not a problem. You want to focus on the real errors picked up by the validators.
- HTML Validator https://validator.w3.org/,
- CSS Validator https://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/,
- RSS Validator https://validator.w3.org/feed/ (this one is a must anyhow).
- GTMetrix 🌐 Once your HTML code passed the previous steps, I suggest you test your website's performance from different locations. And you can do that for free with GTMetrix.
- SSL Comodo 🔐 Check your SSL and HTTPS setup using that website, follow their advice, or Google to improve your rank. There are other similar SSL checkers, but this is the one I prefer.
- Alexa 🔝 If your audience is potentially huge, I would suggest giving a try to Alexa. They have several auditing tools you can try for a month that will help to get things straight. Note that Alexa is also doing the most famous website traffic ranking, so getting their advice will never hurt you.
- SEO ✨ Another paid service though IIRC you can audit your website once a day. They are pretty complete and give very detailed feedback. Try it!
- Social Networks Cards 👥 When people share links from your website on social networks, links are usually resolved and information from your website metatags grabbed to get a nice preview card of your website. So double-check for the social network that your audience will use that your links will look good on them.
- Microdata 📝 It is a W3C standard that defines how to add more semantic to your page contents and helps search engines better index your pages depending on their nature. For example, if you have a cooking website, there are microdata attributes to add to your HTML code on your recipes: https://schema.org/Recipe. There are microdata attributes for almost anything. Selling physical goods, news, ... So check schema.org and implement anything that matches your website content.
- Google AMP 📱 It requires some work to put in place, but it will improve your SEO on mobile browsers. And on Google in general.
- SERPsim.com 🔎 Alike the social network cards, here you can preview your website in the results of a search engine. Make sure you make it the most descriptive and clear for the people looking for your website. But also attractive to get new visitors!
OK, you've done all that? Now you are the king of the Internet! Vive le roi 👑!
Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash
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