After months of work, it’s tempting to put the website aside once it’s live. But the first weeks are exactly when the bugs nobody spotted on the test version come out, and when they’re easiest to fix, before they cost you enquiries. Here’s a plan for the first 90 days.
Launch day
- Redirects from old URLs. Every address of the old website that had traffic or links from elsewhere should redirect (with a 301 redirect) to its closest equivalent on the new website, not to the home page. Check the dozen most important ones by hand.
- The indexing block. Test versions often tell search engines not to index them. Make sure that didn’t reach production, in robots.txt or in the page tags.
- Forms and contact. Send a test enquiry through every form and check it arrives where it should. Tap the phone number and email address on a phone.
- Analytics. Check that page views are counted and, more importantly, sent forms, taps on the phone number and booked calls. Without that, in a month you’ll have nothing to compare.
- Search Console. Submit the new sitemap and check that the domain is verified.
The first two weeks
- 404 errors. Look at Search Console and the server logs. Every frequently visited address that ends in an error is a missing redirect.
- Indexing. Check the pages report in Search Console: are the most important pages indexed, and if not, why not.
- Real devices. Ask a few people outside the project to find a price or book a call on their own phones. Their questions and hesitations are the most valuable list of fixes you’ll get.
- Search ranking swings are normal. After a big change, rankings may move for a while before the search engine processes the new addresses. Panicking and making more changes in that time usually does more harm than good.
The first month
- Speed for real users. Core Web Vitals data in Search Console covers the last 28 days, so you get the first reliable picture after about a month. We explained how to read these results in our article on PageSpeed and LCP.
- Visitor paths. Where people come in, where they leave, which pages lead to contact. A page with lots of traffic and no enquiries is a good candidate for improvement.
- Search queries. Search Console shows which queries the website appears for. There are often questions worth answering on a service page or in a new article.
The second and third months
- Compare with the period before launch. The number of enquiries, their quality, search traffic. Ideally in a simple summary, like a marketing report that shows a few numbers instead of dozens of charts.
- Fix one thing at a time. A headline, the order of sections, the form. With more traffic you can compare two versions in an A/B test; with less, make the change and watch it for a few weeks.
- Update everything that leads to the website. Your Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, email signatures, industry directories. Old links to pages that no longer exist are a waste.
When something isn’t working
If after three months there’s traffic but no enquiries, start with the list in our article on why a website loses leads. The culprits are usually simple: an unclear first screen, a form that’s too long, no prices.
Every website we build is handed over with analytics set up and a plan for the first measurements. See how we work on websites.
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