If this is the first time your business has had a website, then the launch can be quite an exciting event, but you should hold off on that for a moment. You don’t want to publish your website only to find out that it’s not yet fit for your customers to view and use it, as that could lose you a lot of sales. You should be making sure that your site is functioning exactly as intended, and that it’s easy for your audience to use.

If your site isn’t functioning correctly on use, it could deter new viewers, and they may never come back due to their poor first impression.

Picking a stable platform

First off, you need to make sure that the foundation your site is built on, and the server that is hosted in is reliable. If you want your site to be able to be viewed consistently, and nothing goes wrong with it – you need to invest in the right services. This link will take you to a service you might think is fit for you! Be careful when choosing, and understand that even if some services are a bit more costly, they need to be able to match up with your needs.

Proofreading

If your site is ready to go and be released to the public, then you should do a few more checks over the whole thing. Every business-related website should be professional, and if there are a lot of obvious spelling errors or mistakes – it’s not going to look great for you. Take the time to read over everything that’s been written, send out links to others to help you check over them, and add some final touches. It might not seem like a big deal, but your reputation should be as spotless as can be.

Testing links, responsiveness, and user capacity

Proofreading is just the first step of the testing before you release it to the public. There are a lot of tests that you should be carrying out, else you can’t guarantee it’s going to be completely user-friendly.

Your links are a major part of navigating your site, and they can easily be set up incorrectly if you weren’t careful during development. You should go through the site a few times checking each and every link to make sure that they lead to the correct destination. Broken links can be frustrating when you’re trying to navigate a website.

Then there’s also the responsiveness. How does it feel to navigate the site? Is it slow? Do links take a long time to load? The responsiveness of a webpage can be affected by multiple different factors, like the hosting server, or the machine of the user. Generally, you should make sure your site isn’t too demanding, as not all of your customers will have up-to-date hardware.

Stress testing is vital if you’re going to make sure your site can handle a large number of users at one time. While traffic might be slow at the start, you’re aiming to reach the point where your site is seeing hundreds of clicks at one time. Stress testing your site will help to ensure that it won’t crash under the pressure of large amounts of users – and everyone can browse without trouble.