4 Things To Do Before Launching Your Website To The World

Launching your website into the world can be daunting, but there are a few things to check and make sure of before you show off your site to the world! And so we've compiled below the top 4 most important things to get right for any website launch or at least have them in your sights to rectify...Let's jump in!

Make Sure Your Spelling & Grammar Is Correct

Definitely an obvious sounding one, but it's incredible the number of people that forget to check not only spellings but grammar too. A poorly written area of copy can be spotted a mile off by your website visitors and is one of the biggest and arguably most basic fundamentals to get right for your image.

Quoted from Sharp Minds, here are the results of an A/B test that compared results of changing the quality of grammar and spelling.

"According to a study by Website Planet, bad grammar and spelling mistakes on websites are bad for business.

They ran an A/B split test with two similar landing pages – one with immaculate grammar, the other with several spelling errors.

This found that:

• The mistake-riddled webpage lost nearly double the number of potential customers compared to the typo-free version.

• The time spent on the typo-filled site was 8% less than the time spent by visitors on the accurate page.

These findings confirm previous research carried out by serial entrepreneur Charles Dunscombe, who reported in a BBC interview in 2011 that a single spelling mistake on a page of his then website tightsplease.co.uk cut the value of sales per visitor nearly in half."

Not only your brand image is affected by poor spelling and grammar, but your website SEO is too.

As well as the immediate drop in website engagement, Google ranks your website partly on how engaged a user is.  This is surmised by how long they spend on your website. The longer you engage someone, the higher your chances are of ranking.

With poor grammar, users are much less likely to spend time on your website and because of this, a higher bounce rate will be recorded. With a higher bounce rate, your website rankings are likely to drop. Although your copy is just one of the contributing factors to how engaging a website is, it certainly is a big one.

For grammar and spell checking, we recommend you not only go over your text regularly to ensure it always reads well but using a tool like Grammarly can be massively helpful too. We'd highly recommend it!

Make Sure the Design Matches Your Brand

The real point behind this tip though is continuity. Creating a funnel through your ecosystem that at every point in time a user knows where they are is so important. One of the ways to do this is by matching your brand assets so they all look similar and the same. This means no matter where your user is, on your socials or website, they know they're in your ecosystem.

Additionally, making sure the design of your website matches your brand is important for giving the right message and impression to your web visitors. An overly colourful and informal website design won't match the brand of a corporate bank. Just like a flat, formal sounding website won't match a brand whose audience targets young teens. Getting the design right helps you speak to the right audience!

Make Sure the Images Are Great Quality & Web-optimised

Time and time again we see people putting content and imagery as a low priority for their website and we think this is a huge mistake. (Read our full blog here for why we think great quality images are so important for your brand!)

But to roughly summarise:

• Great images make you look professional and create social proof.

• Great images tell a story!

• They help you attract your ideal audience.

• Great imagery help you sell more.

Images help you be authentic. Alongside the overall boost in social proof, you must also be aware of how images should be used on your website from a technical perspective. When you visit a website, you're essentially "downloading" the content onto your computer to view. One of the biggest slow-downs in this making your website take longer to load is image size.

Be aware to upload high-quality, but web-friendly versions of the content you're planning to use and use tools such as Compress JPEG and Compress PNG which can help!

Complete The Ecosystem

Your website is a central point in your brand's ecosystem so making sure it contains everything you need a visitor to know and linking out to everywhere important is something you should do your best to get right.

Including links to blogs, contact forms, products as well as outbound locations such as your social media profiles are all up there with things to remember if applicable on your website.

Creating a complete ecosystem keeps your potential customers with your brand for longer which will ultimately give you a higher chance of converting them!