The most important procedures that we advise you to take before launching your site and even publishing it to users

Many website owners become frustrated when they encounter the first error on their site that appears to visitors and leaves a negative impression on the site. Of course, it would be bad if the visitor's first experience on your site was not positive, as this will leave a lasting negative impression of your site, even if you correct the error later.

What can be done to avoid this problem?

The solution is to prepare your site from the beginning so that it is fully ready before launching it to the public. Good preparation of the site’s appearance, sections, and other details means the success of your site and the continuous linking of visitors to it, and vice versa. Whether you own a WordPress site or any other site, this article will be the best guide for you to make a list of the most important tasks to do before launching your site, in order to avoid potential problems that may appear to visitors and leave a negative impact on your site. In this article, we will address three main headings, in which we will discuss the procedures that must be taken before starting to design and develop the site, then we will move on to the procedures that must be taken into account during the design and development phase, and finally we will highlight the procedures that must be taken after launching the site and announcing it to users.

Contents of the article: First: Procedures that must be performed before designing and developing the site Second: Procedures to be performed during the design and development phase Third: Procedures to be performed after launching the site and publishing it online First: Procedures that must be performed before designing and developing the site 1- Determine the site’s specialization and field of work The first step and the basic pillar on which the following procedures will depend is to identify and choose the specialization of your site. Will the site be a blog for publishing digital articles and blog posts?

Or are you about to launch your own online store?

And other options. This choice will help you build a platform that helps you create this type of website in an easy and inexpensive way, such as the WordPress platform. You must write a complete list of the services that you will provide through your site. For example, if you plan to provide a file upload and upload service on your prospective site, you need to obtain large site hosting from a professional party to store the large data expected to be downloaded and uploaded by users on your site. The matter is also different when you plan to launch a website for a commercial activity, whether it is an online store or a private company through which you display your digital products or services.

Read also: How do you choose the market for your online store (Niche)? 7 practical steps 2- Study the market and understand competitors. In any field of work you will find competitors. In some fields, the number of competitors is so large that you need to review your accounts and come up with a distinctive work to overcome the intense competition. You can benefit from the competition that the market imposes on you if you can conduct a study of your market and understand the services and products that competitors offer well, taking advantage of their strengths and exploiting their weaknesses in order to overcome them in the services you provide to your users. Therefore, before starting to design the website, we advise you to study the market and carefully choose the site’s specialty.

3- Choosing keywords related to your site’s specialty. One of the most important things that you must pay attention to before you start designing your site is to work on identifying the keywords used by the visitors or customers you target through your site’s content. For example, if you are planning to launch a site that provides recipes for oriental foods only, in this case you will have to choose from among the keywords that are closest to your site’s specialty and that have significant searches. Whereas a word such as “Eastern pizza recipe” may be better than “pizza recipe.”

Although both are valid keywords for such sites, the first mainly targets the Arab audience, and will be a good opportunity to gain visitors and rank high in search results, while the other will take a lot of effort from you to work on customizing the site’s articles accordingly, and in the end your site will not appear in search engines when you search for it, because it is simply a common keyword and not a customized one. Read also: The complete guide to choosing keywords for SEO 4- Choosing hosting and domain One of the important steps that you must take before starting to design your site is to choose a suitable hosting, on which your site data will be uploaded so that it is publicly available over the Internet, as well as the domain, which is the distinctive link to your site, such as the link to the WordPress website in Arabic www.wpar.net. One of the most important tips regarding domains is to choose a domain that does not contain many words or characters.

Try to choose a short and simple domain name that is easy for visitors to remember and easily search for again. You can also use the comprehensive guide to choose the best hosting for your website. 5- Determine the method used to design your website. Website design and development methods vary greatly. Some methods are less expensive than other methods, and some are more efficient and easier in terms of management and modification later.

Therefore, before launching your website, we advise you to communicate with more than one professional website developer and detail all the ideas and goals on which you will build your website. There is no harm in obtaining some advice from specialists about choosing the most appropriate design and development method for the website, and ensuring some other important points, including: What degree of security will the website enjoy? Will the website be adjustable in a quick and accurate manner? Will the process of changing and customizing website links be simple and easy or complex? Will there be a comprehensive control panel for the site that enables the administrator to manage the site without the need to possess advanced programming skills? Site speed and the time it takes to open internal pages should be as short as possible.

Will it be possible to create memberships for visitors on the site? The points we mentioned above are the basic points that you should ask about when discussing the website project with the website developer you have chosen, with the aim of identifying the optimal design for the website to achieve these points and provide a distinctive experience for your visitors. For more precise details, you can see the comprehensive guide on: Steps to designing a professional website.

There are many modern and advanced ways to create websites. For example, the famous WordPress platform is used to design websites in a simple and timely manner. WordPress also provides many security options and a long list of templates, designs, and ready-made plugins that you can rely on to organize the site and provide a unique browsing experience to users. You can see the following detailed article that explains the types of websites that you can design with WordPress if you want to get more information. 6- Designing visual identity and building brands. Visual identity is the impression that a visitor or customer has of you in general. Visual identity is not only related to designing the logo for your business or the external appearance of your website, but it also includes various elements that help your customers and visitors remember the appearance of the site or the form of the brand and make it a solid model of distinction and success in their minds.

Here are the most important elements that you must take care to design well in order to build a unique visual identity for your site or business: Accurately design your site’s logo, which will be used within the website and on all platforms and advertising cards for your site completely. Make sure that the logo design is simple, reflects the nature of your business and is easy to understand, and of course you must take into account the colors you chose previously for the general appearance of the site. Determine the main colors of your site. For example, the WordPress website in Arabic depends on the colors purple and gray, which will generally be used in the logo and cover of your page on social networking sites and other various designs.

Make sure to choose the color that is most relevant to your business field. For example, green always indicates life and vitality, and therefore it will be suitable for sites related to the medical field. Thus, you have learned about the most important procedures that you take before launching your site. Let us move to the next stage, which is during the design and construction of your site. Second: Procedures to take while building your website. In the first part of our article, we talked about the procedures that you can take in order to prepare your website for the design and establishment stage.

This step will help you a lot in making good decisions during the next phase, which is the site design and development phase. It is one of the essential stages, as it is the production and output stage of your website. Below we will highlight the most important procedures that you can rely on at this important stage in your website’s life cycle. 1- Preparing the content of your website in the appropriate way. In the first stage, before starting to design the website, we detailed how to choose the method of designing and developing the website. Whatever method you chose to design and develop your website and build the internal pages and links to it, you must begin now to prepare the internal content that will be displayed and browsed by visitors.

Here are the most important procedures that you must pay attention to when working to improve and prepare the content of the entire site: Design the home page in a way that makes it easy for visitors to fully review and browse the basic contents of the site. You can, for example, create a drop-down list that contains links to all subsections and internal pages of the site, in order to facilitate the browsing process for visitors. If your site is a blog that publishes informational articles or news, you can create a navigation menu containing the main and subcategories or sections under which the site’s articles fall. If your site is an online store, customize and prepare important pages on your home page. For example, you can place special offers and seasonal discounts on the home page so that they attract customers’ attention directly through the home page.

Do not forget to customize the basic pages of your site, such as the “Contact Us” page, the “About Us” page, the “Privacy Policy” page, and other pages that will serve as the official link between you and your customers or visitors to your site. Make sure that the textual content within your site and on various pages is as clear, easy to read, and free of spelling errors as possible. Never be lenient in this aspect, as many visitors get fed up with frequent spelling errors and quickly leave your site and form a bad impression of it.

Try to make all images on your site exclusive to you, and do not use images from other sources that have copyrights or private ownership, in order to avoid legal problems related to stolen content, in addition to the fact that users prefer exclusive content that is not copied from other places. 2- Improving the user experience for your site visitors During the design and development phase of the website, close attention must be paid to the elements that help provide an easy, uncomplicated, and comfortable browsing experience for your site visitors. Here are the most important points to take into account to improve the user experience.

Make sure there are no empty pages or pages without useful content for your site visitors when they enter them. Every page on your site should include valuable information that the visitor can benefit from. Make sure to reduce the size of images within the site without losing their quality.

This will reduce the site's loading time and reduce the bounce rate. Use CDN services to boost your site's loading speed and overall performance. Always try to increase the site's loading speed to the maximum extent possible. The faster the site, the better the user experience within it.

Improve the size and type of font that you use within the site, do not use large or small sizes that are illegible, and test fonts and their sizes on the screens of different devices, the most important of which is the screen of smartphones. Ensure that the site and all its internal pages are compatible with smartphones. This comprehensive guide can help you make the site mobile-friendly, as most website users in our time use smartphones to browse the Internet.

Customize the 404 error page that appears to your site visitors when they access an incorrect or non-existent link within your site. Make sure that all links within your site work properly, whether they are links to pages within the site itself or links leading to external sites or pages. Set the Favicon mini logo that appears at the top of the site tab in the web browser, to place your site logo in this position.

Place social media icons and add links to your pages on various social networking sites, such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, etc. This will help you expand your circle of followers on various social media platforms, and you can also automate publishing using IFTTT. Show your site design to friends and those close to you before launching it, and ask for their opinions on the points that need improvement or development. Do not underestimate any idea or suggestion as it may be very useful for your site in the long run. 3- Prepare the site for search engines. In order to be able to gain more visitors or customers, you must make your site rank at the top of the results. Most users are satisfied with the first page of search results on Google, especially the first results.

You can imagine if you were running an online store and it was at the top of the search results for a commodity or product, sales would certainly be very large. The search engine optimization process is one of the most important processes that must be taken care of during the site design and development phase to ensure the site’s success in the short and long term. This includes several things, including: customizing and preparing permanent links on your site, as improving permanent links works to support your site’s compatibility with different search engines. If you use WordPress to design your site, we advise you to use the best SEO plugins that help you in many tasks related to preparing your site and all its internal pages for different search engines.

Read also: Search Engine Optimization Guide for WordPress Websites 4- Ensure protection procedures and site security The security and protection of your website are also essential points that should never be underestimated. If your site is subjected to hacking attacks or sabotage, your efforts may be in vain and all the time and money that you spent in designing and developing the site and planning all of its content may be wasted. We advise you to read the guide to securing and protecting WordPress sites from sabotage attacks of all kinds to prevent any security problems that may occur to your site. Securing your site includes several tasks, including SSL security certificates to encrypt communications between your website visitors and all site links.

The security measures for your site, which enhance the protection of data on the site, also include customizing a backup system on your site, through which you can take a backup copy of your site, where it will be stored in a safe place online or offline, in anticipation of any defect that the site may be exposed to and cause partial or complete loss of site data. If any error occurs on the site, you will have a backup copy that contains the entire site’s data and internal content, and you can restore it whenever you want. Third: The most important procedures after launching your website online. In the third and final part of our article, we will assume that you have finished the planning stage and collecting ideas, as well as the entire design and development stage of the website and its internal pages.

We will then move on to the most important steps that will help you launch your website successfully without errors and leave a positive first impression on visitors. 1- Testing the site loading speed After you finish the site design and development phase and before you launch the site publicly, you must first test the site loading speed. We advise you to use tools such as isitwp, gtmetrix, or Page speed, which provide an evaluation of your site’s performance as well as some recommendations to improve the site’s speed. After testing your site's loading speed, make sure to improve the site's speed as much as possible in order to improve the user experience and reduce your site's bounce rate.

2- Test the appearance of the site on all browsers. Test the appearance of your site on all popular web browsers. You may sometimes find that a browser does not support displaying an animated image bar on the site, for example. In this case, you can refer to a web developer to fix the problem for you. 3- Adding the site to Webmaster Tools The first step to working on improving your site’s appearance in search results is to add the site to the Google console or Google Webmaster Tools, which is an essential tool that enables you to monitor the appearance of your site in various search results and operations.

4- Add the site to Google statistics. If you want to obtain useful information about the countries from which visitors enter your site, or the average age of visitors to your site, the language they speak, the links through which they enter your site, the times during which visitors to your site spend time within its pages, and other very useful statistics, you can link the site to the famous Google Analytics service, which provides you with statistics that help you make your site successful. Read also: An explanation of Google Analytics to analyze your site’s data and develop its performance (a comprehensive guide) 5- Prepare a plan for electronic marketing for your site After reaching the stage of launching the site and making it publicly available to all visitors, you will finally have to pay attention to marketing to the site’s content and try to obtain the largest number of visitors or customers interested in the site’s content. We advise you to read the various e-marketing guides to help you build a good and effective e-marketing plan for your site.

Conclusion: Do not get ahead of yourself and do not rush to create and launch your own website. You must first pay attention to the pre-implementation stage, study the idea, review market studies, and understand your competitors in a good way. All of these factors help to present the idea of ​​your website in a way that attracts visitors or potential customers to you. Do not forget to take a backup copy of your site content in order to protect site data in the event of any sudden glitch or problem on the site.