fabio souto

My website prelaunch checklist

Things to check before launch day

This is a document that I’ve been updating during the latest years. Obviously It’s not mandatory to meet all the requirements, I just use it as a reference and it helps me to reinforce good practices. Feel free to make suggestions.

Application testing

  • Ensure all test are passing
  • Stop verbose error reporting, then check 404 and 500 pages

Backups

Load time

  • Load test (blitz.io, JMeter…)
  • Check number of HTTP requests
  • Add expires headers
  • Move JS to the bottom
  • Compress/minimize js/css
  • Check if server it’s serving gzipped content
  • Optimize images
  • Enable caching
  • Check indexes in the database
  • Configure CDN

Monitoring

  • Server monitoring (Munin, Nagios…)
  • Setup web analytics
  • Setup Feedburner

Standards

  • HTML/JS/CSS validation
  • If the site use search, check Opensearch

Design

  • Check if the text-to-background contrast is adequate
  • Page readability
  • Navigation is easy to identify?
  • Favicon and mobile icons

Accesibilito

Social

  • Check Opengraph tags
  • Add/test social buttons
  • Check social button integration with Google analytics

SEO

  • Redirect http://www to http://
  • Check meta tags
  • Add canonical tag to duplicated content
  • Sitemap.xml
  • Check url structure
  • Create a robots.txt
  • Submit to search engines
  • Build some backlinks
  • Check terms and conditions
  • EU cookie law

Security

  • Check HTTPS
  • Scan vulnerabilities with an automatic tool
  • CSRF token

Fomento do emprendemento e a consolidación empresarial a través do traballo colaborativo. Vigo 2017.