Launching Your Website is a Key Moment
It’s not exactly rocket science to know that launching your website is going to prove to be a key moment, but even though this is obvious, it’s still amazing how many people do it wrong.
Now, you are probably sitting there wondering how you can go wrong with this kind of thing. Surely you just put the website live and that’s it?
Well, if you do believe that, then you are one of the many people that have just been missing out on the main point.
In order to get to this point, you need to have jumped through various hoops and got over a range of obstacles before you are in the position to launch your website. Thankfully, there are various tools that will often prove to be rather useful with all of this, so if you are at that point of getting ready to launch your site, then this could be an interesting post.
Now, we are going to also skip past a few of the early stages such as getting the correct domain name and hosting, because those are common sense and you will have already done that. Instead, we are talking about taking things further and to the point where you are ready to unveil your master creation to the world.
After all, you want the great reveal to go well and not to just sink without a trace, don’t you?
The Key Tools to Move Forward.
As we said, we are skipping the hosting and domain name stuff, but we are going to jump right in just after that particular point and start with an SSL Certificate.
An SSL Certificate is going to help encrypt various aspects of your website and users are well aware that it gives them some added security, which is something that they love. You will see the padlock and the domain name starting with https rather than http as a sign that it does indeed have this certificate.
It used to be the case that it cost you money for this certificate, but that changed in late 2015 where it’s now free. As it costs you nothing, there’s no reason for you to not have it and some hosting companies provide it anyway, so you might not even have to do anything extra. However, the confidence it gives your users in visiting your website is well worth double checking.
Monitoring Tools.
If you thought that you put your website live and then that’s it, then think again. Instead, things can go wrong at any point even if it’s not your fault, and yet, you might not even be aware of it and, as a result, will be missing out on potential clients or customers.
That’s why we do recommend that you take full advantage of website monitoring tools that do this automatically and report back to you. They run constantly, so even if you are asleep then you can rest assured that this software is keeping a close eye on things. You will then be made aware of any issues when you log back on and can then take the appropriate action.
Error Tracking.
Even though you may have tested your website to the point of exhaustion, that doesn’t mean that you will have potentially caught all of the bugs and errors. That’s why it may be worth your while investing in error tracking tools that will let you know when users have encountered a problem.
This is important because you want to rectify those errors as quickly as possible since that user may have just decided to go elsewhere thanks to their bad experience. You don’t want that situation to replicate itself time and time again, do you?
There are several tools out there that can do this job, but do just double check how much they charge before signing up.
Web Analytics.
Finally, there are web analytics tools and we strongly recommend that you use them. They are going to provide you with so much information on how people are using your website allowing you to then make the appropriate changes in order to improve usability and reduce bounce rates.
Now, even if you are unsure as to what the different stats are telling you, it will at least put you in the picture of where people are coming from, what they are looking at, how they are getting there, and so many other rather useful snippets of information. It will also make it easier for you to create a marketing plan that will work all because of the details from these tools.
These are just the basic things that we recommend when you are going to be launching your website although there are others such as file storage and the ability to create emailing lists and send out bulk emails to those individuals. However, just launching your website without putting any kind of thought into it is just not an option at all and by doing this, you are just increasing your chances of things becoming a failure.
