What to Do Right After You Launch Your WordPress Website

The day of your WordPress website rollout is an exciting one. But that’s just the beginning of your efforts to grow your business through your website. In the long run, you will still have to add or change content, update information, adjust calls to action, create or update a landing page, and so on. You can also take plenty of action in the short term. Soon after your website rollout, it’s best to explore and harness all the available tools to help you better manage and promote your website. The following website post-launch checklist will be your guide.

Website Post-Launch Checklist

Here’s a list of immediate things to do after launching a WordPress website.

Monitor Website Uptime

Set up an uptime monitoring service as soon as your website is live. This will allow you to keep watch over your site, and if it goes down, you’ll receive an email or SMS. A free tool such as Uptime Robot is all you need to monitor your website’s uptime.

Use Google Analytics

Every website owner should use Google Analytics. It’s a free tool for tracking your site traffic, where visitors come from, what they click, and much more. Access to these metrics helps you analyze how profitable your website and marketing efforts are.

To track these metrics, set up a Google Analytics account and add the tracking code to your website. Follow this guide to get started with Analytics.

Set up Google Search Console

Another essential tool for webmasters is the Google Search Console. It helps you address potential site issues, adjust your SEO as needed, and access other data about your site essential for maintaining a healthy, responsive and up-to-date website.

To submit your site on GSC, you’ll also need an SEO plugin like Yoast to generate your XML sitemap, which is a file that helps search engines crawl your website. Once you have the sitemap, submit it in the Console and follow these steps to finish the setup.

Get a Content Delivery Network

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a service for delivering your content to visitors worldwide much faster. A CDN stores data from your website on remote servers on different continents, and visitors who access your site will get served from the nearest location to them. There are plenty of CDNs to choose from, such as MaxCDN, CloudFlare, and Amazon CloudFront. Don’t worry, it’s not too late to get a CDN in place after your website rollout if you didn’t have one.

Install a Backup Plugin

To avoid disasters, such as data loss due to hacking or other malicious activity, it’s essential to have a current backup of your site. On WordPress, you can accomplish this easily with a backup plugin such as Jetpack. It keeps your site backed up in real time with no storage limits. Also, restoring that data is made easy, should you ever need it.

Change Your Username and Password

For someone who has some experience with hijacking accounts, it’s not that hard to break into your website. They have time and software that generates thousands of passwords in a blink. With just a little luck, they’ll be able to intrude into your WordPress console.

That is – if you keep the same username and password you were using in the development stage – which could easily be cracked. The solution is to change your credentials to something criminals can’t guess simply. Use a password generator to make your site, and its contents secure. No more using Password1234.

You can also improve security with a plugin like WP Limit Login Attempts. It is self-explanatory and useful. We also recommend you store your passwords securely with LastPass.

Write Blog Posts

A blog is a vital marketing tool for any emerging business. If you have a small company and reaching out to prospects seems difficult, posting practical articles on your blog can help bring you traffic and boost your brand awareness without setting one foot outside your comfort zone.

Also, writing blog posts consistently (at least two articles per month) is good for SEO, improves your credibility, and provides shareable social media content for your followers and visitors. Having a blog is a must for any business. You could write articles yourself or hire a copywriter to do the deed.

Register or Update Your Website Online

The web provides a magnificent opportunity to reach and really engage your target audience. If you already have social media accounts or directory listings for your business, you need to update them right after your website rollout. Your site might have a new domain name, logo, or other changed features. So update your accounts with this new information regularly to get the most out of your online presence.

If you’ve built a new site from scratch, that’s all the more reason for you to set up accounts on social media and other outlets. Let the world know you’re in business. Offer them what they need, and they will come – especially if you follow the right marketing plan.

Do Email Marketing

While social media is a great way to promote your brand, email marketing is also a simple yet essential tool. But email marketing only works if you have an email list of potential clients to market to. If you have a big list, that’s great, but it can (and should) always be growing. Use a popup strategy on your website to gather those coveted emails.

As far as the actual marketing goes, you can send monthly newsletters with news and tips, or you could create and send offers for your products/services. But don’t spam people – nobody likes spam.

Implement a Business Marketing Plan

We can’t stress this enough – it doesn’t really matter if your website is a masterpiece of innovation. It’s not going to bring profit all by itself. What truly matters to succeed is to follow a solid marketing plan. It includes a website post-launch checklist like the one above.

For Marketing Services or Web Design/Development, Contact Bright Pink Agency!

At Bright Pink Agency, we can help you analyze your business from a marketing standpoint and develop a practical marketing plan best suited for your business. If you think you could use some marketing orientation or are in the market for a new or improved website, call us or drop us a line. We help businesses like yours grow daily, and we even work with franchises.