On today’s episode we’ve got 50 plus things we’ll talk about to look at before you launch a WordPress website, right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast Episode No. 374.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler. Today we’ve got a big long list – a huge checklist of things to go through and make sure to doublecheck before you launch a WordPress website. But before we get there, I’ve got three announcements and one plugin that I want to share with you.

The first piece of news that I want to share with you this week is from WooCommerce, and that’s WooCommerce 3.3 has been released. It’s a minor update and all the changes should be backward compatible, but you do recommend running any tests and doing things on a backup or a local version of your website. The big change that you’ll see – there’s a few of them that are there in WooCommerce 3.3 – is the big one is the order screen. It has a revamp of the complete order screen, so if you go to orders under your WordPress dashboard, it’s been redesigned to be simpler and clearer, while it has the same amount of useful features that are built into it. It’s been built to be backwards compatible with other extensions, and so everything should continue to work normally. You’ll see a big improvement in the order screen.

It also now has a new stock status, and products can now be on backorder status. This combines with some improvements in automation to make the product stock management experience more intuitive, which is great. Another big thing that you’ll see in WooCommerce 3.3 is now WooCommerce stores on themes that don’t declare WooCommerce support. They’re going to look and work much better. The way that the layout of the store fit neatly into any store layout will look great. It’s just a big improvement that makes sure that even if your theme hasn’t declared support for WooCommerce, it’s still going to work. Now, this means that you can use WooCommerce with almost any theme from the WordPress.org repository.

There’s also been image size improvements, features for store owners, features for store builders and developers, and it’s a minor update, like I said, and you can update right through the WordPress dashboard. There have been some template files that have changed, so if you have modified some template files, you’ll want to update those. There are a whole handful of them – maybe two dozen or so. Then, they’ve deprecated a few functions and methods in WooCommerce 3.3. If you haven’t updated, I recommend updating today and start using that new order screen and get that redesigned look. It just feels so much newer and nicer. That’s the first thing I wanted to share with you today.

The other thing that I want to share today is WordPress turned 15 years old this week, which is crazy. It’s been a successful software project for 15 years and it has the ability to draw people together from all parts of the world, which is really cool. Just a big thank you to Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little for creating WordPress, the contributors for keeping the ball rolling for this many years and providing opportunities for so many people. If you think about it, think about how many people use WordPress to create a fulltime living off free software that was created 15 years ago. It’s really a huge, huge thing. I am really excited that it’s 15 years old. The project hasn’t had any slowing at all. It just continues to grow and grow and grow. That’s WordPress turns 15.

The last piece of news that I want to share with you this week is UpdraftPlus acquires Easy Updates of plugin manager. This UpdraftPlus is a popular WordPress plugin, that’s actively installed on more than one million websites. It has acquired the Easy Updates Manager plugin for an undisclosed amount. Basically, the Easy Updates Manager disables core themes and plugin updates in WordPress and provides granular control over them. It’s a plugin that you can install in your website and then other store admins or other people that have access to your dashboard, they don’t get the opportunity to update and break things within your WordPress site. That is a piece of news. It hasn’t been disclosed what’s going to happen and how those two plugins are going to work together, but that is something that happened in the news this week in WordPress.

In the ‘Is There a Plugin for That?’ section, the one that I’ve stumbled upon this week is called wA11y, the Web Accessibility Tool. That stands for wA11y, is actually web accessibility. It’s a plugin that provides you a toolbox of resources to help you improve the accessibility of your website. It basically has some tools built in to help you go through your website and make sure that your site is accessible. Data shows that one in five people have a disability, so if your site is inaccessible in any way, you could be excluding about 20 percent of your potential users, customers, students, and more.

The foundation for good accessibility is great markup, which also means that good accessibility can improve your SEO. So, lots of tools built into this. It is a free plugin on the WordPress repository and I’m definitely going to have to check it out and spend some time debugging it, and just looking at it and see what kind of features it does have. That is wA11y, which stands for Web Accessibility Toolbox.

All right, moving right along, we’re going to continue and wrap up the month here of January and just talk about a WordPress website checklist. This is a list with tons of items on – we’ve talked in the past couple weeks about things that we might overlook when we’re launching a website. We talked about the print boxes. Is the site formatted for print? If your CSS is compliant with different browsers. We talked about short codes to make sure those were all working. Now, we’ve just got a big, long list of things that we want to make sure – that way when we’re ready to launch a website, that we have them all set up and ready. Some of these can be implemented after the fact.

Like, the first bucket of things I’m going to talk about is backups. If you don’t have a backup on your current website, I recommend doing that. You can set up this process on a website that’s been launched for years and years and years, not necessarily one that you are launching right away. The six main areas that we’ll talk about are backups, functionality, analytics, content, design, and compliance. We’ll talk about all of those, and we’ve got subpoints in each one of those.

Let’s go ahead and start about backups. When we’re getting ready to launch a website, backups are really important. We want to make sure that there is a copy of a final website that’s made for backup somewhere, so whether that you export the site with BackupBuddy or any of the other backup tools that are out there, you want to make sure that you have a copy of that site, so you can always reference that for some reason. You may get a point where a client comes to you, or somebody comes to you and says, “Oh, hey. This isn’t working as I expected.” Then, you can look at the site that you released to them and gave to them and see that it’s working. Then, you can decide whether or not the person has been tinkering with the site or has had something broken. So, a backup copy of a website is always great.

You want to make sure that 24/7 monitoring scripts are installed. So, what’s that mean? That means that you are – it’s always monitoring your website, the backup security feature. We want to make sure that the website it backing up on a regular basis and that’s both the database and the content and the theme files, the plugin files and whatnot. You want to make sure that those are stored regularly off site, so they’re not stored on the same server as your website. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to have a backup on the same server as the live site. When your server goes down, you lose both of them, so you want to make sure that those are in different places.

Another one is, you want to make sure that your website’s passwords and other credentials for your site, so any integrations you may have, are saved in a secure spot. Maybe that’s 1Password, maybe that’s LastPass, maybe that’s some other proprietary system. I want to make sure that you have those as a website developer and make sure that your client has those, or the person you built the website for. Make sure that they have all of those details, as well, so that they can log in to different accounts for their domain name and their hosting and their WordPress website. Make sure they have access to all of those things.

In the functionality bucket we want to talk about making sure that all of our forms are submitting data properly. You want to make sure that there is a thank you message that returns properly when somebody submits a form on your website. You want to make sure that the form data is being emailed to a recipient or stored in a database. Make sure that that information goes to the person submitting the form if you want to, and the person on the contact end. You want to make sure that all of those pieces are working right.

If there’s any type of auto responder, make sure those are working properly. Those auto responders kind of go along with email newsletter responders. Make sure those things are firing. If somebody signs up for your email list, are they getting the free giveaway, or whatnot. Make sure all of those things are working. You want to make sure that the load time on the site pages is working and optimized, so you can run a few pages through some Google Analytics tools or Tools.Pingdom.com, some of those sites, to see how fast your website is loading. Then, work through any of those issues to make those go from a B, C, or D rating, up to an A rating.

You also want to make sure that their company logo is linked on the homepage. This is kind of a trivial thing that sometimes gets overlooked. That’s usually the first-place people go when they want to go to the homepage, is click on that logo. You want to make sure that any external links across webpages are working properly. Make sure that they open in a new tab. Make sure those are kind of set as the default, maybe from the menu, if there’s items in the menu that go to another place, make sure those open in a new tab. If there are internal links across webpages, make sure those are working right. Any links from blog posts or pages or content or anything like that, make sure those links are all working properly.

You want to make sure the social media icons that are in the upper left, upper right, lower left, lower right, top of posts or pages, where ever those may be, make sure that those are all working properly and pointing to the right social media accounts. You want to make sure that any 401 or 404 redirects are working properly. Go to your website.com/ and then just type a bunch of gibberish in and make sure that you get the pages not found, that template that’s created by WordPress, or part of your theme. Make sure that that is working properly.

You want to make sure that your feeds are working properly, whether that be RSS or newsfeed or social media feeds. Make sure all of those pieces are working right, so you can subscribe to an RSS reader. Make sure the most recent blog posts show up. Make sure that social media, if you’re using something, some sort of widget that pulls in your recent tweets or pulling in your latest Facebook messages. Make sure that those are all working and set up properly.

Then, you want to doublecheck all integrations with third party tools, like your CRM, your newsletter subscription thing. Make sure that all of those pieces of the puzzle are working. If somebody submits a form or they do something, make sure that all of the content is going in the right direction, in the right place. That’s some things I thought about functionality. I’m sure there are tons of other things to make sure that you’re doublechecking when you are getting ready to launch a website, but those are the big key features, when it comes to functionality.

When it comes to analytics, you want to make sure that your analytics code has been added to your website. You want to make sure that if you have some sort of funnels or goals, that you want to be tracking, make sure that those are properly created and set up. Make sure those are working. You want to make sure that your Google Webmaster and Google Analytics accounts have been properly synced. Make sure that those are working together properly.

Then, you want to make sure that you are blocking, or you’ve excluded any relevant IP addresses from the analytics tracking. That probably means yours, that means your clients, that means a handful of different IP addresses will be needed to make sure that they’re not skewing the analytics. This one’s probably a little bit on the tricky side, especially if you work in an office or you work from home and your location changes every once in a while. You want to make sure that you are blocking out those different places that you’re working, so you’re not going to skew the numbers and those relevant IP addresses. That’s under the analytics bucket.

Under the content heading, I’ve got a bunch of stuff here. You want to make sure that all generic content, especially that lorem ipsum, that generic text that you throw in when you’re building and designing webpages, make sure that those have been properly removed or replaced.

One tip about this is, you can save snippets of code like this into text expander, or you can save it somewhere and copy and paste it. Then, you can do a quick find and replace, or at least a search and replace throughout your WordPress site. Look for lorem ipsum, use certain text that is only in that section that you’ve copied and pasted or used text expander. Then, that will help you easily find this across your website.

You want to make sure that all images, audio, videos are in correct places. They’re formatting. They’re working on all size devices. You want to make sure that all rights to images, fonts, and content have been properly licensed or cited. You want to make sure everything is proofread. That could be a tedious task and it could take a very long time to proofread everything, but make sure spelling and grammar are correct, especially on big headlines, especially on the homepage, and areas that are showing up on every single page. You want to make sure that those are all proofread.

Check the copyright date. This is one that gets overlooked sometimes, is make sure the copyright date in the footer includes the current year, whether you say from like 2003 to 2018, or you just say copyright 2018. Make sure that’s up-to-date. I would recommend putting that in code and using a PHP snippet inside your theme, so it just pulls the current year based on the server. That’s going to allow you to not have to update every website at the end of every year. That’s something to think about.

You want to make sure that contact details are accurate across the site, so that’s email addresses, that’s phone numbers, that’s location addresses. Make sure the contact information or store hours and whatnot are all up-to-date on the website, as well. You want to make sure that all paragraphs, headers, lists, and other formatting things look correct. Does a block quote look okay on all types of devices? Is the styling and the formatting correct there? Look at all that.

Look at premium content, if your site has premium content. Make sure that all of the case studies, e-books, anything that you’re giving away, or any kind of content that’s not on the web, or not in a webpage, but a PDF, or whatnot. Make sure those have all been proofread. You also want to make sure that any premium content, and that’s case studies, or courses, or whatever you may have as premium content – you want to make sure that all of those are stored in the proper area on your website.

You want to make sure that only the correct people have access to this, so that will take you logging out of the admin WordPress account and then logging in as a subscriber or some sort of member. Make sure that all of those pieces are working and they can only access the things that you’ve given them access to. Then, that is the content piece. There’s tons of stuff to look at there. Just basically make sure everything is proofread. Make sure that everything looks good. Make sure that all the details across the website are accurate and there’s no lorem ipsum and whatnot.

When it comes to design, you want to make sure that all your webpages are compatible across browsers. That’s IE 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, depending on how long ago you want to support. Make sure they work in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. You want to make sure the website pages will look good across different devices, as well, so that’s Android, iPhones, tablets, all of those types of devices that are out there.

Make sure that the Favicon, which is that little icon that shows up in the browser tab – make sure that is in place and rendering properly. You want to make sure that any scripts or CSS or images and make sure those are all optimized across webpages. All images are optimized against webpages. That means not taking giant images and trying to serve those as part of your website, but make sure that all the images are sized to the right size, and they’re very small and compressed.

We want to make sure that the CSS and HTML validates. Make sure that it’s properly validating and there’s links that you can go to just do a quick Google search for HTML validation and make sure that all your HTML looks good. Then, you want to make sure that the paragraph styles are working properly. I talked about that earlier, to make sure that the formatting are correct, but make sure they’re working properly, just on different devices and they’ve got the right size and the right color and whatnot. So, that’s design.

Then, lastly, we’ve got to talk about compliance. We’ve got to make sure that all your webpages offer accessibility for users with disabilities. Remember you can use that wA11y plugin we talked about earlier. We want to make sure that the website is compliant with usage rights for purchaser borrowed items or images or fonts. Make sure that if you’re using those types of things, you want to call those out on your website. You want to have a terms and privacy page, that are visible to website viewers.

If your website is using cookies, you want to make sure that your webpage announces that. That’s required in some countries, especially in Europe. Then, if you’re using WooCommerce or taking payment from some other method, you want to make sure that your website is PCI compliant.

You’ve just spent hours making sure that the website is built and the client likes it, and now you have to do all of these things, another huge list of things to make sure that your site is ready to launch. It is a little bit overwhelming and it is a lot of things, but I promise, when you go through some of these things, it’s going to make the launch go that much more successful, and it’s going to help you stay calm and cool and collected when it’s time to launch this website.

Those were the things that I want to share with you this week. Tons of things to think about and implement on your own website, if you haven’t done it already. When you’re ready to launch your next website, I recommend checking out Episode No. 374, which you can find at YourWebsiteEngineer.com/374. You can find all the things we talked about there, so you don’t have to go back and re-listen to the episode. I’ve got all the bullet points written out there, right in the show notes. That’s what I want to share with you this week. Take care and we’ll talk again soon. Bye-bye.