So Your Website is Built, Now What?
The “Go-Live” Process
Taking a new website live can be an easy (or frustratingly complex) procedure.
There are a few pieces of information we’ll need before your new website is ready to roll:
DNS Login – your DNS Manager is usually the place you registered your domain (ie. GoDaddy, Network Solutions, etc.). The DNS Manager is like Air Traffic Control – when someone types your domain into their browser, the DNS Manager receives that request and routes it to the corresponding server (translating the URL or web address into an IP address like 206.123.64.217)
In order to ensure minimum interruption, we try to change just the A Record for your domain…that’s the record specific to your website, while the MX record is the record responsible for routing your email (something we try to avoid changing).
Once the A Record is changed, it can take up to a couple hours for the new “route” to make its way throughout the internet. Until it is fully “propagated”, people may bounce back and forth between the old and the new site. NOTE: If we are simply replacing your old site, but housing it where it already was, then the change is instant.
If you don’t have access to this login for some reason, the whole process becomes quite complicated, so having this login is vital!
Web Host Login info – If you are hosting with someone other than one of our hosting partners (REDiTECH and Flywheel), we’ll need the login credentials to your host…this allows us to go in, setup the spot on the server where your new site will live, and ensure we have what we need to migrate the new site (usually from our development server) to that space.
Once it’s live…
Google Analytics Login – tracking visitors to your website can provide powerful insight into your viewership and how they interact with your site once they’ve landed there.
You’ll need to provide a Google Analytics login so we can embed those real-time statistics directly into your WordPress dashboard for your easy reference (shown here).
301 redirects – page rerouting. Many times your new site’s page URLs will no longer match those of your old site (especially if your old site wasn’t on WordPress already). Since search engines may have already mapped your site and it’s links, we need to tell those old links where to go on the new site. We will manually enter each of these new page routes and check them to make sure they work correctly.
Testing, Testing, 1-2-3-4 – we’ll test the pages, contact forms, and any other special features on your site to ensure it is displaying properly on both your computer and mobile devices.
Hello World!
Now that we’re live, tracking, rerouted and tested, it’s time to announce it to the world! Social media, email blasts and announcement cards are all great ways to show off your new site.
Be creative, give them a reason to visit and see what they think!