The day we launch our website can be quite nerve-wracking. This is especially true if we have publicized the eventual launch of our website. Any issues could cause concern and when problems happen during the launch day, we will scramble to ask for tech supports. It is possible to eliminate the common issues related to the launch of our website. Our primary goal is to gain significant recognition on the Internet. All we want to make sure is that our website should be shown prominently on search engines to ensure steady traffic. Even for fully working websites, this can take some time to achieve. Search engines use different algorithm, but we should make sure that our website can be indexed quickly. Smooth launch will ensure that our website will have a maximum exposure and we will be able to gain the kind of recognition we want.
We should have a launch day goal that is too general. In our plan, we should incorporate possibilities of issues related to the launch day. Technical errors could happen when our website fully runs on the server. It is important to start simple by using as few as code modules. Reduced complexity will make our website more reliable. The design should also be straightforward and too many design elements could also pressure the server significantly. It is a good idea to only just enough content to introduce our website, products and services. Launching websites with 100+ pages and many images may increase the rate errors.
When we launch our website, we should make sure that everything is readable. Search engines will quickly check our website and if there is access problems, it is possible that we will get slight penalization. Search engines may consider that our website is not working properly and is unreliable. Another good thing to do is by having a soft launch period. In this case, we could quietly launch our website on a subdomain. We may not publicize the soft launch period, because any error can be shown on the user’s browser during this period. During the actual, official launch; we could simply move the website from the test subdomain to our primary domain.
The soft launch period also tells us whether the server is able to cope with our code and design. However, we should know that there could be problem with the capacity of the server in handling the influx of traffic. When many people start to visit our website, we should make sure that the server can handle the traffic. There’s no sure-fire way of knowing this during the soft launch period. Fortunately, during the launch period, the traffic is usually quite manageable, but if we have spent enough effort on publicizing our website, then we should constantly monitor the level of server utilization. If we have nearly used up the server resources, then it is a good idea to start migrating our website to a better server. As an example, we may move from shared server to a dedicated one.