Before publishing your site

 These are the steps we recommend you take before publishing your site. They’re all covered in the video below. 

• Run through your whole site on your computer and also on phone and tablet. Ideally, get someone else to go through your site as well, for example a friend or family member.
• Make a point to check your contact page. Is your email address on there correct? Are your contact forms working? Do you receive emails and messages?
• Unpublish your coming soon page
• Make sure your site can be indexed by search engines
• Turn on the caching plugin we installed for you. This makes your site much faster.
• Make sure all the links on your site work – you can use a broken link checker for this.

Watch the video below for a full explantion:

Resources mentioned in the video:

If you have a coming soon page
To unpublish your coming soon page, go to the class about creating a coming soon page. In the video you can see how to unpublish the default coming soon page at about two-thirds in; from 2:39.

What is caching?
Every time someone visits a page, all the necessary info is loaded to build a page on the fly (that’s how every WordPress website works as standard). Then the next time someone visits that same page, the same info is loaded and built all over again for that visitor. With caching, the building of pages happens only once (for the first visitor), and then is stored in a cache (some kind of memory bank). The next time someone visits that page, the code that makes up the page is already there and doesn’t have to be built from scratch. It’s served from the cache, which is much quicker for your visitor.

Tool for checking the links on your site
There are several free online tools to find broken links on your site. Dead link checker is quick and easy to use. It scans up to 2000 pages for free, so you can use it to check your whole site.