Building or releasing a new website or online presence is an exciting step for most businesses. Normally a lot of money and time has been spent on the build, the content, the creative and more – so it’s worth taking that extra time and effort to ensure the right review is done to identify anything that could prevent the best possible exposure to your intended audience.
QnQ Consulting can provide a critical launch readiness and review step that identifies and helps remediate issues with a website – ideally before launch, or immediately after.
Here are some common items we identify that often get overlooked:
- Accidental blocking of search engines – normally this is done during development to prevent search engines from exposing pre-launch staging & development sites, but very often the removal of these directives often find their way into production at launch. Checking of robots.txt directives, meta and HTTP Header instructions at a site and page level is essential.
For more information on these, here are some helpful links to Google documentation: - Proper canonicalization of URLs – internal linking to the intended final and “canonical” URL is essential to instructing search engines where your content lives and what URLs are intended to be indexed. Ensuring that internal links are without unwanted redirections, and that canonical references reinforce this is crucial to providing search engines with the clearest instructions.
Again, Google has some good instructional information: - Non-exposure of staging and development domains and content – it’s common to have agencies build websites for clients and use their own development domains, or equally have in-house development teams use their own development environments. At launch, all references to these staging and development domains should be replace with the final intended production domain. While this issue can occur in a number of different ways depending on the development approach and systems, Google has the following:
- Accidental blocking of search engines – normally this is done during development to prevent search engines from exposing pre-launch staging & development sites, but very often the removal of these directives often find their way into production at launch. Checking of robots.txt directives, meta and HTTP Header instructions at a site and page level is essential.
Next Step
If you find yourself at the pointy end of a new website build or are about to launch – you should really make sure you have someone run a sense-check over these items, as many issues fixed before the launch button is pressed means that any unintended negative consequences can be remediated with little or no impact, and is much more preferable to trying to fix after the fact.
Feel free to reach out should you find yourself in that situation.