Final check before site launch
May 21, 2008 – 7:26 amYou new product and site is ready for a big day, everything looks fine on your side, but are you 100% sure ?
1. Cross browser test
Open your site in all browsers you have and check is everything fine.
Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Safari are most popular and you must test your site in all of them.
Install Web Developer Firefox Add-on and test all screen sizes.
Use browsershots.org to preview site in many other browsers and resolutions.
2. Server availability check
Visit host-tracker.com and check is your server available all around the world.
If not, contact hosting support or change server (I would change it).
3. Payment processor test
Set test price for your product to $0.01 and try to purchase it.
4. Product delivery test
Free mail servers like Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail could block emails from small hosting companies.
If your customers don’t receive product in next few hours after purchase, you will be in trouble with refund requests, comments on forums and email contacts.
Open one free email account on each of these services and test it.
Write small php code:
<?php
mail(”test@yahoo.com”, “Email Test”,”Email Test”,”From: your-email@your-domain.com” );
?>
Save it to mailtest.php , upload to your server and visit your-domain.com/mailtest.php
Change “test@yahoo.com” to your new free email and repeat process for each email.
On “Thank You page” mention what is subject of your email and explain that it could be in Junk box.
5. Backup server
During first few days high traffic can crash your server or jealous competitors could make DoS attack.
One DoS attack may take about 48 hours and in that time nobody can see your site.
You need to make copy of your site to another server and in case your main server is down you can quickly change DNS settings inside domain register.
I use PowWeb as backup server because they host site on multiple servers which is more secure for DoS attacks.
Save NS1 and NS2 settings for backup server in online email, so you can react fast.
3 Responses to “Final check before site launch”
great points. There is nothing worse then launching and then realising you weren’t quite done!
By Tom - StandOutBlogger.com on May 22, 2008
Some great pointers there, thanks. Trying to think of anything you missed. How about
1. Check you have a robots.txt file
2. Check you have a sitemap submitted to Google.
3. Check you have redirected your non www version of your site to the www version (to avoid duplicate content).
All I can think of
By Reverse on May 27, 2008
checking cross browser functionality is key. I hate visiting a website and seeing code in weird places.
By Tom - StandOutBlogger.com on Jun 28, 2008