Well, first off, congratulations! Whether you built your website yourself or hired someone to do it for you, launching a new website for your business is a big milestone and it’s OK to take a moment to celebrate!

Once your website is launched, you may wonder what your next steps should be and we’re here to help.

In this post, we will be going over some tips and strategies to implement after your website has gone live.
We will not be covering a pre-launch checklist, which is also vitally important!

If you have questions about what to do before your site goes live, please let us know – we will cover that extremely important topic in a later blog post.

Ok, let’s say your website just went live. The lever is switched and all systems are a go!

Now what?

Announce it!

This may seem obvious, but let people know you have a new website.

Share on LinkedIn, social media, newsletters, and any and every way you communicate with your audience. If your web designer or agency shared news about the launch on their social channels, share their post as well!

Maybe even shout out some of the features of what makes your new website so dang awesome to give people a reason to click over. Like, “Ordering is so much easier on our new website!” or “Have you seen our gallery page dedicated to puppies?” (note to self, create gallery page of puppies…) Other than it’s new and shiny, give people a reason to check it out!

Create a content plan

Don’t let your home on the internet stay inactive – SEO takes time to build, so continue to create helpful and relevant content on your website. We know new website content can be tough for a lot of business owners to keep on top of. Creating new content doesn’t have to be challenging and even one blog post a month can be enough. If you need a hand with content creation, drop us a line!

Some ideas to help get your wheels turning:

Create a post for each of your most commonly asked questions
Highlight any new releases or new product features as they are released
Share about your company culture, behind the scenes
Share some industry insights or opinions
Get involved with local organizations by volunteering or sponsoring and write about it

Watch out for broken links

Even if your web developer made sure to redirect any pages that may no longer exist from your old site to your new one, sometimes pages may be missed.

Any page that external links point to that is broken is doubly bad as your website will lose all of that SEO juice coming from those other websites. Ahrefs offers a broken link checker for free. This will include both links going out to other sites and links coming into yours. While the links coming to your website are the most important, you don’t want any outbound links broken either. Just a good practice to keep an eye on after a new launch.
In addition to links going in and out, you’ll want to make sure all internal links are also working correctly.

This is where you get to CLICK ALL THE BUTTONS!

Monitor your rankings

Your organic search rankings are likely to fall a bit when launching a new website. These should bounce back pretty quickly though, so if you notice that rankings have yet to rebound after a few weeks, there may be a bigger issue. Something may have been missed during site launch, or your new website may not have the same level of SEO optimization. If that’s the case, you may need to call in the experts! 👋🏻

Back it up!

Make sure your website is backed up regularly. Some hosting platforms, like WP Engine, will do this automatically. Make sure you know if your website is being backed up, or how to back it up anytime you need to make changes or plug-in/theme updates.

If you stay on top of your website with updates, link checks, new content, and backups, it will take great care of you for years to come!

Questions? Drop us a line!