STEP 11
Launch and Maintain Website
Things to Know:
- Regularly update content when possible
- Monitor site performance and security
- Perform regular backups
- Watch out for: Neglecting ongoing maintenance, which can lead to security issues and poor user experience
Ready for Launch
Wow! you made it to Step 11 Launch Website. It's finally time to unleash your new site into the world wide web. You've double checked all the links. Enhanced any performance issues and are now ready to share your beautiful new site with the world.
This final step is about ensuring a smooth launch and mainting a healthy website. Even after launch there are a number of things that need to be done.
Assign Your Purchased Domain Name
Up til now you may have been using a temporary URL or domain name generated by your hosting company.
On GoJOEDaddy.com you can simply go to the Domain settings in settings tab for the temorary URL and change it to the one you purchased. It may take a little while before everything swithches over from the temporaray to the real URL with the SSL certificate. If you've been using a "Under Construction Page" just reassign the home page in the Customizer to the page you want as the home page and remove the Under Construction Page.
Post Launch
Now that your site is live and accessible you'll want to ensure that it is being indexed properly. If youv'e installed Yoast and have successfully setup the Google Site Kit you should be covered. If not you'll need to create a site map and submit too Google for proper indexing. Yoast Premium creates the site maps for you along with adding Schema tags on each page. Schema tags provide a way to annotate web content with specific types of information, such as events, products, reviews, recipes, and more. This semantic markup helps search engines understand the meaning and context of the content on a web page.
Website Administrator
If or when something should happen to your website that you should go to view it and it pops up an error message stating there is a problem and you need to contact your website administrator, that administrator would be YOU.
GoJOEdaddy offers an affordable solution to website maintenance that will not only keep your site safe but also increase its rankings and give you peace of mind that if something goes wrong or wacky you have a website adminstrator at the ready to fix any issues.
Maintenance
There is not enough to be said about keeping up on website maintenance. In world where technologies are making advances at an alarming rate we need to do whatever we can to protect ourselves and our webistes.
Even though we have security measures in place, they are no guarantees that it can't be hacked. Updating your Security and all other plugins on a regular basis is imparative. Failing to do this will eventually cause compatibilty issues along with leaving yourself open for attack.
The Plugins I used on this site and all my sites recieve updates regularly. Getting regular updates from the developers tells you that the plugin is being updated and improved on for both securtiy and funtionality. Check the status of a plugin before installing it. Don't use Plugins that haven't been recently updated. And if your using a plugin that hasn't been updated in over a year you should consider a replacement plugin.
Core Updates
Beyond the plugin updates there the core updates. These updates include the WordPress Platfrom, Your WordPress theme and the PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) PHP is primarily used to create dynamic web pages. It allows developers to generate HTML, CSS, and JavaScript output on the server-side before sending the final content to the client's web browser. In other words this is controlled through your Hosting Company.
Regular Update Reminder
I have a reminder set in my calendar to visit all my websites to check for updates at least once a month. In most cases I'm already making updates and changes on a regular basis so updating isn't an issue. Some websites can become static where no changes are made to the copy images or blogs happen for a long time. These are the sites that get forgotten and regular updates become not so regular. Until the day it's discovered your site is down and you no longer have access to it.
For real peace of mind export your pages to a JSON files. This is easy to do with the Divi theme and will ensure you always have a hard copy of your site. Just remember to add and replace the JSON files as you make changes or add pages. You can also export the websites settings as JSON file that will include any additional CSS you may have added. That way, If the worst happens and all else fails you will be able to recreate the site in no time.
Have Questions?
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