Publishing your website to the Internet is the culmination of many hours of hard work getting your site exactly how you want it. As you get closer to publishing, it’s easy to rush the final steps to get your site out for the whole world to see!
Sprinting to the project’s finish line is understandable, but too much haste can lead to a published website that’s full of errors or does not work as expected. It’s potentially embarrassing, unprofessional and can be a real negative to your site visitors. So why not take a breath then run through our checklist blow before hitting the ‘Publish’ button. Save yourself the hassle of having to go back to make lots of changes, corrections or fixes after you’ve published.
Here’s the checklist of things to review on your EverWeb website Project before publishing…
- Set up a Favicon for your site. The Favicon is the little square image that appears beside your URL in the web browser search box. It’s a nice professional touch to your website even if it’s not an essential feature to include.
To add a Favicon, go to the File-> Edit Publishing Settings. Scroll down to the Favicon section and choose an appropriate image (preferably one that’s square!). EverWeb will do the rest when you publish. When including a Favicon in your site, it may take a few hours for replication around the web for it to show up in the browser search box.
- If you have EverWeb 2.4, or higher, set the Language Localization for your website and for any individual pages as necessary. This is a great feature to add as it will help serve your visitors searching the web with more targeted search results. Check out our blog Language Localisation in EverWeb 2.4 for Better SEO! for more details.
- Check that you’ve implemented a ‘404 Page Not Found’ error page for both desktop and mobile versions of your site.
First, create a ‘404’ error page for both desktop and mobile sites then set up a mobile redirect using the ‘Mobile Settings’ section of the Inspect or tab. In this way, if a user gets a 404 Page Not Found error when using a mobile device, they will be directed to your mobile 404 Page Not Found error page and not the desktop version.
Once you have linked your desktop and mobile pages together, go to Site Publishing Settings. Scroll down to the ‘Advanced Options’ section. There’s only one option ‘Not found page’. Click on the drop down and set the page to the desktop 404 Page Not Found error page.
- If you have any unused assets in your website project that you know you won’t be using in the future, now is a good time to remove them. When developing websites, there’s often experimentation that leads to some ideas that you move forward with and some that you abandon. As such, your Project file may get cluttered with extraneous image files so why not remove them and reduce the size of your Project file at the same time?
To remove unwanted assets first go to the Assets tab. Select ‘Find Unused Assets’ from the drop down menu that’s to the right of the word ‘Assets’.
Any unused asset will be highlighted. Review these highlighted assets before removing the ones your don’t want.
- As SEO is baked in to EverWeb you don’t explicitly see features labelled as ‘for use with SEO’. If you have not included SEO in the planning of your website, it’s never to late to include it. Using SEO is the best way to improve your Search Engine Ranking Results. For a better understanding of SEO and how to use it in EverWeb, or if you just want a refresher, check out the SEO for EverWeb Course.
- If you have an EverWeb+Hosting Plan and EverWeb 2.4 or higher, you can add end to end data encryption to your website with HTTPS. To add this, tick the checkbox ‘Use HTTPS Secure URLs’ feature in Site Publishing Settings. For more information about this feature, check out the EverWeb 2.4 Released Making Your Website Safer! blog post.
- If you use Social Media, add an image to your web pages for social media purposes in the Page Details settings of the Inspector tab of your webpage.
- Spelling, typos and grammar checking! If you’ve written your own text content for your webpages, it’s easy to miss out on finding mistakes in your own work. If possible, get someone else to read through your text to find typos, spelling mistakes and grammatical error. It’s also useful for another person to check your sentence and paragraph flow.
- Preview your website before publishing. Preview shows you how your site will look when published without publishing the site to the Internet. You can interact with Preview to test out most features of your website, but bear in mind that some features, such as sending email, only work when your site has been published.
- Before you press the ‘Publish’ button, check to make sure you’re publishing to the correct location by reviewing the ‘Publish’ section of ‘Site Publishing Settings’. It’s especially important to do this if you’ve been publishing to a ‘test’ location before going live, or if you have more than one website under your EverWeb account. Accidents can happen, and you don’t want to be publishing your site to the wrong location.
These tips should make your publishing easier and reduce the need to correct your site afterwards. If you’ve got a tip to share, please let us know in the Comments Section below! Thanks!
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