Today I have just one announcement and that is in the past week or so another WordPress Beta has come out. It looks like they’re always coming out on Wednesday. So Wednesdayish. And so it seems like I’m always almost a week behind with this. But 4.6 Beta 3 is now out into the wild. It’s still in development. And they fixed a lot of things. They’ve got a long of changes made there. There has been 65 changes in the last week. And they’re working on auto-save. So auto-saves can be restored when previous revisions are deleted. They’re working on improving PHP’s memory limits. They are working on the tiny MCE editor panel. That has been edited to 4.4.0. They’re working on proxy settings and to do some things with the HTTP API and a whole bunch of other bug fixes.

So if you haven’t had a chance, I highly recommend installing it, giving it a trial, and giving it just kind of a play through and see what you can find. Still on schedule it looks like for the middle of August for the next version of WordPress. And so be on the lookout for that.
All right, another thing that I want to share with you this week is the plugin of the week. And this one is called WP Safe Updates. And it is a plugin that is currently in alpha. Or it’s in a beta version. But it is a plugin that will allow you to safely test updates before applying them to a live site. And so it’s kind of a unique way. It almost when you press the button. So when you get a plugin update in your WordPress dashboard, it will say there’s a new version of this plugin available. You can view the changed notes or the details. You can test update, or you can update now. So it adds that extra little test update link in there. And what that does is it creates a sandbox of your site. So it creates a duplicate of your site. And then you can test the plugins without affecting the live site.

It’s really pretty neat. It’s a neat way to think about it. And it’s a cool thing that could be added to your website so you could test it without having to manage two separate sites and keep both sites updated and online. This is something, again, that I said is an alpha. It is something that doesn’t have too many active installs. It’s under 30 or under 100. And it’s just something that you may want to try out and play with if you are interested in easily creating a development site or a staging site real quick to test a plugin before it goes live on your website. So it’s called WP Safe Updates. And you can find more about it in the WordPress repository.

Lastly before I get into the main part of the show, Jay wrote in and let me know that some libraries have lynda.com accounts. So a few
episodes ago, back in episode No. 292, I talked about a few different places where you could learn WordPress and where you could take some WordPress courses and things like that. And he had mentioned that some libraries have lynda.com usernames and passwords that you can login and you can view courses that way. So if you are interested in a lynda.com subscription, you’re not willing to pay $25.00 per month for the access to that, I would check with your local library and see if they have some sort of credentials or some way that you can check in and use their Lynda.com account.

All right, onto a WordPress launch checklist. And this is just a big list of things that you want to test and make sure are working properly before you launch; a brand new website. And this is come with some years of experience. It’s come from lists that I’ve seen online. And a website is a big project especially if you’re launching something brand new. It’s a website that’s built from scratch. You’ve got maybe this big, long list of requirements from your client. You’ve sent hours or weeks or even months getting this website ready for launch. And now it’s like now we’re ready and we want to just create a checklist so that we don’t accidentally miss things while we’re getting ready to launch. And so that’s what this checklist is all about. So they’re not in any particular order because you can do these in any order. But these are just kind of the way; the order that I thought of them as I was preparing for this show.

So the first one is you want to check the scope of work. You want to make sure that everything that has been asked for or required by the client has been completed. So you want to check that. You want to look through it. You want to make sure that any revisions that were made or any changes that were made to the scope of work have been fixed as well. And so that’s the first thing to look at. Check out the scope of work.

The next thing is once you’ve got the list of scope out there, you’ve checked it, you want to make sure that you’ve completed all outstanding tasks. You want to make sure that you have checked your i’s – or checked your i’s – dotted your i’s and crossed your t’s. You want to make sure that everything that has been requested has been done.

The next one, point No. 3 is you want to make sure that you’ve checked every single page. And you want to make sure that you’ve checked everything. You’re going through the about page, the contact me page, the blog pages. You’re looking at every piece of content that’s on your site. This is also the time to look to make sure the logo looks good. Are the menus functioning properly? You’re basically starting at the top of your site and kind of going down through every single page. It may be great to open up the site map and just kind of click on every single link, and make sure that every single link and every single page looks good.

But that’s the next thing; review every single page. The next one that you may not think of is purchase all stock photos. A lot of times we build websites with just stock photos to make sure – and we’ve taken screen shots of the stock photos just to kind of put them in as image place holders to make sure the client likes them. And this is a perfect opportunity to go through and make sure that we’ve purchased all those images so that they don’t have the watermarks on the images. So that’s another thing to do.

Tip No. 5 is you’ll want to set up a privacy statement. You want to make sure that every website has a privacy policy and a privacy statement in place. You want to make sure that that page is there and normally linked to from the bottom of your website in your footer area.

Checklist item No. 6 is read through the content. I guess I said that earlier. But we want to make sure that once we’re checking all those pages, we want to make sure that we’re actually reading the content, we’re making sure there’s no typos, no spelling errors. You can always install a plugin. The Jetpack plugin has the ability to spellcheck. And so that can help you work through and make sure that there’s no outstanding spelling errors on the website. Again, this is all very, very tedious. This doesn’t have to be completely done by you. You can have a member of your team do it. You can hire somebody to take a look and read and do all the grammatical work on your website as well.

You also want to test your 404 page and make sure that works. So you’ll want to type in your URL and then just type some random characters and hit enter and see what happens. Does it take you to the proper page? Does that page have a nice layout? Are you using lead pages for that page and so you can redirect them to a signup form? You just want to make sure that something happens when somebody gets to a wrong page on your website.

You want to also verify that your favicon works. That’s the little square image that appears in your browser window, up in the browser tab. You want to make sure that that works. Sometimes they come out of the box with – Bluehost might have their icon up there unless you explicitly change it. Sometimes the theme has it already built in. So you want to make sure that it’s a favicon that works well and is something that is good for your customer or your client; some sort of branding that is. So that’s the small, little icon in your browser tab.

You also want to verify that all your social accounts work. You want to make sure that if they’re using the Jetpack publicized feature, when they hit publish it actually goes to the correct account and not your Facebook dev. account, your testing account. You want to make sure that all of the links go to the correct Twitter account or Facebook account or LinkedIn account, whatever that is. Whatever social accounts you have, make sure all of those links work. Make sure if you are clicking on one of the share buttons from the post or page, you want to make sure that all of those are working properly as well. You don’t necessarily have to publish the post. But if you click on the Facebook share button, it looks like it’s going to share with attributes back to your website and whatnot. So check all of your social accounts.

You also want to test for W3C compliance. There’s a website that you can go out there and you can placed in our URL for your website.

And it goes in and looks at the pages and makes sure that all the coding is proper. Especially if you’ve designed a brand new theme from scratch, you want to make sure that you’re in compliance with all the W3C rules and regulations that are out there for websites. Like I said, there’s a website now linked to that in the show notes.

Check No. 11 is make sure your site is SCO ready and your site is visible. Most of the time when we develop websites we keep that site private until we’re ready to launch. We want to make sure that we’ve checked that box and be indexed by websites. And if we’re using some sort of SCO plugin, that we’re actively setting up and all pages have been optimized for SCO, our entire site has been optimized for SCO as well.

Check No. 12 is make sure you have robots.txt file. This file is needed for web crawlers to crawl your site and know what’s there. So just make sure that that is there. We’ll also want to check for mobile friendliness. This tip probably should have been with the check every page. You want to make sure that you’re checking a lot of your pages on your mobile device to make sure that there’s no crazy issues. I would venture to say that you should do this for any page template you have. So if you have a single page template, or the single post template, a single page template, an archive page, a blog post page. Go through your homepage. Check out all of those ones that you have custom templates set up for and make sure that they’re mobile responsive as well.

The tip No. 14 or checklist No. 14 is make sure you upgrade WordPress and verify plugin compatibility. You may have started developing the site three or four months ago and now WordPress has rolled out a brand new version and there’s a lot of plugins that need updated. You want to make sure that you update all of those, and make sure that everything is updated in order, and all of those plugins work together. This is something that it could crash a few things, but it’s always best to give a site off to its owner in brand new version, with the newest version of WordPress and newest version of all plugins.

No. 15 is confirm your SSL certificate if you have one. Most websites these days should be using an SSL certificate. Even if you don’t have a store, but especially if you have a store or a web-shop, make sure that that SSL certificate is working properly. Make sure that if you’re viewing your website in Chrome that it has the little green lock. Make sure that all the images are set at HTTPS and all the things that go along with that. And this is something that getting an SSL certificate is something that your webhost can help you set up. You can get a free SSL certificate through Let’s Encrypt.

Checklist item No. 16: You want to make sure that all site processes are in links or work properly. So you want to make sure that all links that are internal links and external links, you want to make sure that those are working. You want to make sure that if you have some sort of special application, maybe you have some sort of calculator on your website, make sure that functionality works.

If you’re taking email news subscribers, you want to make sure that when you add somebody, somebody puts in their email address, that 1.) That the email goes to the newsletter provider, that they get a confirmation email that the free download or whatever is given away has been – that gets sent back. You want to make sure that all of those things are in place and they are working properly. You just basically want to check any extra functionality other than just the website part, the visuals of your website. You make sure that all of those pieces of the puzzle are working, and test them out, try them out, make sure that everything works really, really well.

You also want to review cross-browser compatibility. This is especially important if you’ve developed the site from scratch, and was started with a Photoshop document, and then you’ve created it completely by hand. This is very important to make sure it works on all browsers across all different types of computers. If you developed a theme or if you’re buying a theme from somebody that has already verified – I know a lot of the themes out there have verified that they work on all the browsers. As long as you haven’t made too many customizations they should work. I don’t recommend skipping this step. Take a look at it in several different browsers and make sure that your website looks good in all of those browsers.

You also want to review accessibility. There’s some WordPress standards that are out there that you want to make sure that your website is following just to make sure that your images are accessible and all of those good things as well.

You want to test your speed of your website. Once your website is all set up, it’s running, it’s a good time to go to speedtest.net. Or that’s not the right thing. Speedtest.net will test the speed of the Internet in your house. Scratch that. There’s different ways that you can test the speed of your website. Tools.pingdom.com is one that I like. There’s other ones that are out there that you can go, you can put in your URL, and it will test how fast it takes to load all the pieces of your website. This is really important because now you’re ready to launch and you don’t want to give it over to your client and have a very slow experience, and it takes forever for the admin to load, it takes forever for the pages to load.

So this is a good time to make adjustments if necessarily. If the site’s done, everything’s exactly how you want it, and your website runs really, really slow then it’s probably time to have a conversation to upgrade to a more premium hosting or something with a little bit more power so that the website viewer has a better experience.

Another thing that you want to do, this is No. 20, is to check and double check the website’s security. You want to make sure that you’ve got the iThemes Security plugin installed, that you went through those different line items to make sure that everything is as secure as possible to make it as difficult as possible for people to login or hack into your website. So that is something else to talk about.
And then I have No. 21. But it looks like that’s something that I already said. We don’t have to talk about confirming your SSL certificate again.

And No. 22, the next one will be change your login. So this is kind of a big deal. You want to make sure that anyone that has – you’ve given their logins before so they could go in and modify and change. I would highly recommend changing all of those usernames and passwords. If you’re gonna keep one as an admin to have a username always on your account, you want to make sure that you’ve changed that. You want to verify that all of these passwords work before you send them off to your client, and make sure that they have access to login into their site, especially if they are going to be the ones that are going in, and making changes, and keeping the website updated.

And then I guess No. 22 would be we want to, I guess, stress test your website. There’s ways that you can go out there. And this kind of goes with the website testing your speed. You can run your website through a test where it will automatically load 100s of people viewing your website at a time. And it will give you information back about how the website is performing, if there’s some sort of process that’s running slow, or that something that – this is a good time to do that. You can stress test this.

This is extremely important if you were building a web shop for a huge, huge company and they expect to have 1,000s of people on the website at a time. You want to stress test that. You want to make sure that the server is up to snuff and they are ready to accept all of those payments, all of those views, all of those people adding stuff to the cart. Those are some things to think about as well. I would say if it’s a small mom and pop shop that is just looking to have an online presence, this probably isn’t necessary as much. Just make sure that that speed is working well on the site and the page times are loading really, really quickly.

So that’s the checklist; 22 different things that you can check. And just recommend, whether you have this as a repeating task in OmniFocus or when you launch a product or a project, and then these are the 22 things that you go through and you review before you get ready to launch. Or if it’s just a simple checklist that you have and that you just kind of go through every time that you launch a website. You don’t have to do all of these things. These are the things that I would recommend, that making sure that you test. Maybe you have a few other things that you want.

It’s very hard to miss things if we don’t actually have a checklist. And so I found that checklists are awesome in that fact. Even if you’re packing to go on a weekend trip and you go always every weekend and you know exactly what you want, having that checklist just makes things so much easier so you don’t forget the key pieces.

Again, your reputation is on the line here. If you launch a website and it looks bad, or if it doesn’t work well, or the client has some sort of issues, then what’s going to happen is they’re not gonna recommend you to other people. Then they may talk badly about you on social. Or whatever that may be, you just want to make sure that when you launch a website, it launches perfectly and that it all works really, really well once the website goes. And, of course, you don’t want to launch a website, and then get paid for it, and then a few days later say you have 100s of hours of work because things are broken and things aren’t working right. So you want to make sure that everything is done upfront so you can get paid for all of the work that you’ve done, and then you can move on to your next website project.
So that’s the scoop for today. That is the WordPress checklist. And that’s what I wanted to share with you this week; is just kind of simple, just making sure that we are remembering the same things and going through a very methodical checklist as we get ready to launch a website.

All right, that’s all I wanted to share with you this week. Take care and we’ll talk to you next week. Bye-bye.