The Ultimate Website Launch Checklist

A quality website is the most valuable element of any managed service provider’s marketing, which is why we take every step of the website development process so seriously. This includes the launch phase—everything that needs to happen before and after your site goes live.

We’ve developed a comprehensive process that we follow every time an MSP turns to us for help in creating a website that effectively represents their business—something we call the Ultimate MSP Website. Keep in mind that this is a process refined over decades of launching websites, proven hundreds of times to maximize the likelihood that your MSP website goes live with minimal issues.

If you want to make a great first impression with your website without subjecting yourself to stress and worry, we recommend following the steps outlined here.

Everything That Needs to Be Done Before Your Website Launches

As tempting as it may be to get your website up and running, publicizing your services, all of these steps need to be completed. All of these considerations are included as part of the Ultimate MSP Website service we offer—with a few exceptions we’ll explain as we go.

If you have a firm deadline to launch your website, you will want to complete all these tasks as early as possible. Not only will this help keep you on track, it can also uncover latent issues that need to be addressed before you can go live (which, depending on the issue, could take some time to do).

Check How Your Website Works on as Many Devices as You Can

To market your managed services as effectively as possible, your website needs to be usable in as many situations as possible. You want someone to be able to access it from their workstation in the office, from their mobile device in the passenger seat, or from the couch as they browse on their tablet after working hours. This means your site needs to be mobile responsive.

While most templates and page builders ensure your site is responsive—adapting to be optimally usable on various devices and screens—it never hurts to double-check. Visit and review your site using devices of all types and of all capabilities.

Check Your Design on Multiple Browsers

Similarly, you want to be sure that different browsers also play nicely with your website, as each renders HTML slightly differently, and the results can reflect these differences. This is especially apparent if your site uses elements like:

• Custom fonts
• Button hover states
• Form field styling
• Animations

Ensure you test Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari (using an Apple device) on both desktop and mobile. You will also want to turn on Incognito/Private browsing, as this will give you the experience a first-time visitor will have.

Take the time to thoroughly explore your entire site on each device to ensure that everything, including site navigation, forms, and buttons, functions as intended.

Check for Broken Links

There’s a lot that can happen during site development that could change the URLs of some of your pages. You need to manually go through all your links to ensure they still work, including:

• Site navigation
• Internal links
• Links in the footer

As you check them, pay attention to the URLs themselves. You want to see the exact canonical URL, meaning that every detail matches, down to whether or not a trailing slash (/) is present at the end. You can use tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs after you go live to check these kinds of things, too, but it is always better to solve as many issues as possible before launching your site.

Prepare Redirects

If you already have a website and are starting fresh with a new one, you need to make sure that all your old site’s URLs send visitors to the proper pages on the updated version. Keeping your URL structure consistent can help, but if this won’t work or needs improvement anyway, redirects will be needed to direct your visitors to the place you want them to go.

For instance, if you have your services listed on your old site at /managedservice, and your new site lists them under /services, you’ll need to set up a permanent 301 redirect that diverts traffic from /managedservice to /services. If someone happens to have your /managedservice page bookmarked, using that bookmark will navigate to /services. Additionally, redirects inform search engines about the change.

This can lead to complications with larger sites, such as those with blogs, newsletters, and knowledge bases, which can expand a website by hundreds or thousands of pages. For example, if you were migrating /news to /newsletters, you’d need to set up a redirect for each article, or set up a mass redirect rule in your .htaccess file.

Generally speaking, sticking to standards like /blog or /newsletters from the beginning is better. They’re descriptive, straightforward, expected, and, critically, easier to remember.

Prepare a 404 Page

On occasion, a webpage will reach the end of its usefulness and needs to go away. This is where a 404 page is useful. Let’s say you once held a lunch and learn for a service you’ve since shuttered. The landing page can be redirected to a 404 page.

Most templates have a 404 page bundled in, but there are more things that you can do. For instance, you could add a brief blurb to your 404 page that urges the visitor to give you a call or book a meeting, and provide some navigation to your new site’s homepage. Your 404 page can also be customized to reflect your company culture in tone.

Add Your Terms, Privacy Policy, and Other Legal Pages

While it may not be your primary focus, it is critical that you provide some legal disclaimers and documentation on your website. Please note that we are not lawyers and therefore lack the necessary insight into your preferences for internal data management or services to give you any text to use verbatim.

That being said, we recommend avoiding any prewritten text that you find online, unless you review it and customize it in detail, and ideally have your legal representative give it a look. Templates are okay to use (and are something we can provide), and there are services to help you create your legal text. Again, it is best to turn to legal representation for review.

Once you have an approved document, we can assist in adding it to your site.

It is also critical that you consider all factors that may apply to your situation. If you conduct business in Europe or with EU citizens, you must comply with the General Data Protection Regulation and have a compliant privacy policy. Individual states may also have regulations you need to meet, like California and the California Consumer Privacy Act.

In addition to compliance, being thoughtful in your terms and privacy policies can help boost your perceived legitimacy, professionalism, and trustworthiness.

Prepare Your Browser Title and Favicon

Your browser page title is critically important for your SEO ranking. Each page has one, and most content management systems will automatically populate it with the page’s title and then your site’s title, as such:

Using custom webpage titles like this, rather than generic ones, can really help boost your SEO.

You should also upload a Favicon to your site, which is the icon that appears in the browser tab of your site, as well as any bookmarks and other browser areas. Your logo could potentially be a good option, and even if it isn’t, it could be worth commissioning a version that does work at such a small scale.

Optimize for Speed and Performance

Don’t you hate it when a website you’re trying to use loads slowly? So do search engines, as it tends to increase bounce rates, so it pays off to do a few things to speed it up:

Compress Images and Media
Media, like images and video, are the usual suspects when it comes to slowing down a site’s loading time. To resolve this, ensure all images are sized and compressed to minimize file size without compromising image quality. Videos should be uploaded to media services (such as YouTube or Vimeo) and embedded on your site, as these services optimize the videos extremely well and reduce the load your website has to bear.

Website Caching
Page caching helps speed up the load times of pages that have already been visited, while browser caching speeds up the loading time of a page for a user when they return to it. Your content management system will likely have plugins to help manage this, as (likely) will your host.

Optimize and Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
Time to get technical. Generally speaking, it is faster to load a single large file than it is to load multiple small files, even if the large file is bigger than the small files all put together. You should allow your website to condense any files it can, and then remove all redundant or unnecessary data. This will help boost your website's performance.

It is essential to recognize that not everything can be compressed, consolidated, and minified through your CMS. If plugins or extensions are being used, they’ll often have their own files as well. Just focus on optimizing what you can. If one plugin is causing issues, consider reaching out to the developer for support or finding, commissioning, or developing an alternative.

Turn Off Unused Elements
When you keep in mind that it is possible for a plugin or widget to pose a security risk and adds to the code that a browser needs to process before it loads your website, it just makes sense that you would want to avoid installing too many or keeping any unnecessary ones active. Audit what you have and turn off what you don’t need.

Avoid Effects and Keep It Simple
Studies have examined the efficacy of scrolling elements, sliders, and other showcase elements and have found that they don’t make a significant difference as far as conversions are concerned. Most users scroll on by. Instead, focus on creating a single, well-designed banner. The same can be said of animated effects and videos that play automatically. While these elements can be practical in certain circumstances, they are used at the expense of load speeds.

Select a Quality Hosting Account
While there are $10-per-month hosting accounts available, you will get exactly what you pay for. While we aren’t saying you need a dedicated server at a data center to host your site, you do need to ensure you have great uptime and security. Instead, find a hosting provider that offers:

• A modern content management system
• Outstanding support
• Shared, but provisioned hosting with resources allocated by account

Ideally, you’ll find a provider that also helps maintain your website, handling security updates and patches, PHP upgrades, and backups. (Hint hint, that’s us!)

Set up a CDN

You typically won’t be doing this until you reach the post-launch tasks, and we discuss it in more detail there; however, this is incredibly important for website performance. This is also something you may want to manage on your end, but we’re always here to help.

Optimize Your Website for the Search Engines

You need to prioritize SEO, and while this is an ongoing process as you use your website to publicize your managed IT services, it always helps to start from a good place instead of trying to fix messes you've left behind.

SEO-Friendly URLs
Your URLs need to make sense before your website launches, particularly to your human audience. Do they clearly and concisely communicate what’s on the page they direct to? Let’s say that you offered wireless surveys as part of your services—the URL would look something like services/sitesurvey or /services/wireless.

Consistent Links
You must use the same URL every time you link to one of your pages. For instance, services/sitesurvey would need to be a consistent change, instead of also sharing services/wirelesssurvey or services/wirelesssurveys or services/wireless-survey, even if all of them would work.

Meta Descriptions
Almost every page should have a unique meta description—less than 160 characters—that serves as a form of ad copy. This description will occasionally appear as snippet text in Google results. It won’t directly influence your SEO rank, but it will help draw a searcher to your website if it is descriptive and clear.

Now, not all of your pages will be worth giving a unique meta description—for instance, the 28th page of your blog archive. It can also be strategic, even though an SEO tool will still report that as a duplicate meta description. Instead, just focus on the pages you want to rank for, and Google will generate snippet text for the rest.

Restrict Crawlers and Indexing
Believe it or not, a significant part of your SEO management is keeping Google and its ilk from paying too much attention to specific pages. It isn’t super important for search engines to index every page of your website—your privacy policy or years-old blogs, for instance, aren’t necessary for the search engines to review. It helps to block particular URLs from being indexed, or set up your plugins and components to do so. This way, Google will focus on the stuff that should be crawled and indexed.

Use Proper Formatting
Formatting is the difference between a practically illegible wall of text and readable, engaging content. Breaking it up into smaller paragraphs and using headings to delineate between different sections helps the reader. Additionally, headings aid in SEO, providing search engines with greater context of your website.

You must use these formatting tools correctly; otherwise, you could confuse the crawlers. For instance, each page should have exactly one Heading 1 (or H1) in its HTML… and if it does have more than one, the text should be identical. Your Heading 1 is effectively the page’s title, conveying what the page is about. As such, it is where your most critical key terms should appear.

H2s can then be used to break up your content into the smaller sections we referred to above. In addition to enabling the reader to skim through your content more effectively, Heading 2s signal to search engines what they should consider when ranking the page. If greater specificity is needed, Heading 3s (H3s) can be used to split up Heading 2s.

Optimize for Web Accessibility

Nowadays, a website must be designed and constructed to accommodate everyone, regardless of their disability or circumstances. This is the root of accessibility, and while the laws surrounding it are pretty vague, there are guidelines—called WCAG—that your website should follow.

This enhances your audience’s experience, and again, search engines prefer to see it. Here are some of the most critical guidelines to follow:

• Color Contrast: Your text needs to be easily readable. Don’t put dark text over dark images, or light grey text on a white background.

• Avoid Flashing/Strobing Images: Users with sensitivity to lights (such as those who are prone to seizures) shouldn’t have to worry about your website causing them discomfort. Ensure that no visuals on your website flash or strobe more than three times per second… or at all.

• Provide Text Alternatives for Non-Text Content: Any images on your website (besides decorative images) should have populated alt text that describes the image. This is especially critical if the image has text that you expect people to be able to read. Decorative images should have a blank alt-text field.

• Make Your Website Operable by Keyboard: Users should be able to navigate your entire website without using a mouse or touchscreen, which means allowing them to use a keyboard to scroll and utilize your navigation.

• Provide Inherently Readable Content: Avoid making your website confusing for users. Use headings properly (covered in the previous topic above), use language that your audience understands, and define any jargon or abbreviations.

• Provide a Website Experience That People Would Expect: Don’t go outside of the box when it comes to navigation or the structure of your website. Yes, that means your website will look similar to the millions of other websites out there, but that’s for good reason. If it’s a confusing struggle for a user to navigate and interpret your website, you are likely going to lose potential leads anyway, but it also hurts your accessibility.

• Deploy an Accessibility Widget with an Accessibility Statement: Technically, we integrate the accessibility widget installation into our post-launch tasks, as our preferred widget requires the website to be live to function correctly. However, you should prepare for it before launch. Our accessibility widget not only gives the visitor fine-tuned controls that will make the website more comfortable for them, but it also includes an accessibility statement AND has an AI layer that will keep the site accessible and compliant with modern accessibility standards over time.

Prepare Open Graph

Open Graph is a Facebook-created standardization that social media networks and other sites use to standardize the data that’s pulled from your website as it's shared. If a social media site recognizes the standard, you can specify the image and text that appear in the preview.

To accomplish this, you need your website’s code to define the OG meta properties. The end result: more clicks on the content shared on social media.

Backup Your Data, For Goodness’ Sake

Let’s pause here for a moment. If you’ve been working on your website without a backup, you need to fix that, immediately.

Right now. Do it. All this information will still be here when you’re done.

Okay, now that you have a backup in place (...right?), let’s dive into why you want the security it offers. In short, your website is data… and as such, it needs to be protected against data loss events of all kinds. Your hosting company should be backing it up, but this isn’t enough to trust. Your website should have a backup component that saves copies, and you should also maintain local copies as a precautionary measure.

Everything That Needs to Be Done During Your Website’s Launch

So, you’ve reached the point where your website is ready, and it’s time to go live! Let’s talk about how to make your launch as successful as possible, setting you up for more wins as time passes.

Set Your Site to Index, Follow

Be careful—this one’s easy to miss. Most platforms allow you to prevent indexing or crawling during development, simply so you have the chance to get everything ready. However, you need to switch these capabilities on as you launch your site. This is also a good time to double-check that you’ve prevented those pages you want to avoid having crawled and indexed.

Set Up and Validate Google Analytics and Search Console

Presuming you’ve set up your tracking code/tag on your website, you should open your site in another tab and check the Realtime Overview area in Google Analytics. This will let you confirm that Google Analytics is tracking your information.

You need to do the same with Google Search Console, submitting a sitemap to speed up the crawling and indexing process. After a few days, make sure you come back to check for errors or warning messages.

While you're doing all this, it is a good time to confirm you own your Google My Business listing and that it’s been updated with your contact information and a link to your site, along with some engaging and informative photos.

Set Up Email Authentication (SMTP)

Since your website will almost certainly need to send emails, even if they’re just password reset and form submission emails, you’ll need a verified SMTP user. Set it up so that your website uses it to send emails; otherwise, your forms may not work, and you might miss opportunities.

Test Your Forms

Speaking of your forms, be sure to take the time and fill them out to confirm that you get the submissions and that the right success pages appear.

Double-check Your Site on Desktop and Mobile

Remember how you checked the website's appearance on multiple devices and browsers? Given the sensitivity of responsive design during development, it's essential to review it again to ensure there are no issues. Be sure to check both Android and iPhone, as their default browsers can affect how webpages are rendered.

Be diligent about this check. Go to each page, review all your content, and examine it from the perspective of a visitor.

Set up a CDN

A CDN—Content Delivery Network—offers a few benefits worth taking advantage of, from caching elements to speed up load times to offering some defense against Denial of Service attacks. We typically recommend Cloudflare, which you’ll need to set up at the DNS level.

Furthermore, Cloudflare can synchronize with website cache plugins, allowing you to consolidate the cache clearing process to one button. Keep in mind, this must be set up, but it makes it a lot easier to change your site as time goes on.

Spread the Word About Your Website Launch

This is where you get to brag a little bit about your new website, so be sure to commit to it!

Send emails to your contacts, from your existing customers to your prospects and even your staff. Share the update on social media, too.

You might also want to launch a press release highlighting the features your website offers to your clients or the value-added services you have to offer. This is something we can assist with as an additional service; simply reach out to your project manager.

Looking to Launch Your Website Successfully? We Can Help!

We’ve assisted hundreds of businesses with their websites, using modern designs, templates, and expertise to help create a truly powerful marketing tool that accelerates your efforts.

The first step: a free website consultation. We’ll discuss the goals and budget you have for your website and how we can help you achieve those goals.

Why wait? Reach out to us at 888-546-4384 to get started.