When all your content is in place and everything is ready in your site admin, you're ready to go live with your site. But before you do, use this checklist to ensure everything is in place to give your community the best site possible.
Use this list:
Check Your Site is Ready to Go
Most of your content should be ready to go live now, but there may be some tasks left to do. The following will help your site run smoothly and provide as much information as possible.
- Update your site footer: Add widgets and links to your site footer, such as contact details, social media links, acknowledgments, links to other sites, your sitemap, and your policies.
- Check your site's favicon: This icon will display in the browser tab next to your site name. We will add this for you.
- Set up a 404 error page: Set up a custom 404 error page that site visitors are redirected to when they try to access an unavailable page.
- Check your waste collection dates are accurate: Double-check your waste collection service details in your My Area module to ensure they are correct to your most current schedule.
- Set up Google Analytics: Connect your site with Google Analytics and get data about your site and visitor patterns.
- Change the domain for Google Maps APIs: Ensure that the live domain is added to your API key so your maps work correctly.
- Set up site search: Create a search results page and configure your site search to include the right content.
- Turn on social media sharing: Set up page sharing so your community can share your content on their social media accounts.
- Create URL mappings: Use URL mapping to redirect visitors from old URLs to your new site. We recommend doing this for the top search engine results.
- Check your homepage links: Ensure the links on your homepage lead where they're supposed to. This may include links in your homepage tabs leading to top services, listings, and your featured content.
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Double-check your content: Ensure that your important pages are ready, including any policy pages and the sitemap in the sub footer links. You may need to create or update pages and delete or archive any that need to be removed.
- Tip: Search your site for "test" or "draft" to find any stray test pages that need removal. This may include searching through the Dashboard, admin page search, and internal site search.
Contact Your Project Manager
When your site is ready to go live, please follow this process:
- Decide on your preferred launch date and submit a support case to contact your Project Manager.
- In your support case, please provide the following information:
- Your selected go-live date and time
- The name of your Project Manager (if applicable)
- The type and name of your site
- Contact details for your IT representative
- The go-live domain for your site
- If your site does not have a Project Manager, please submit a support case with the information above, and one of our team will contact you.
When you contact us, please do so at least three weeks before your chosen launch date.
If there are any potential conflicts with your nominated date, your Project Manager will negotiate a new date with you.
If you're using a folder within an existing domain to launch your new site, your launch process might differ. Regardless, we'll contact you and your team with any further instructions or details we need.
Prepare for Launch Day
Once we've agreed on your launch date, there are a few things to do before going live. Before 5 p.m. on the day before your launch date, you will need to pause content updates. Ensure everything you need is published, and let your content authors know they won't be able to make any changes until after going live. You can still make urgent edits after the site has launched.
Your Project Manager or someone else on our team will contact you before launch with any other details or instructions we need from you.
Lift Off
When your launch day arrives, we'll take care of most things. However, you should still ensure that a member of your IT team is on standby so we can reach them if necessary. We may need to restart your site, but you won't lose any content.
To take your site live, you may need to implement DNS settings; we'll contact you if this is the case.
What's Next?
Congratulations! Your site is now live and ready for your community to engage with. Now that your site is live, there are other tasks we recommend to ensure it's working correctly:
- Create a sitemap and submit it to search engines so your site can start being indexed for search engine results.
- Make sure all links on your site are valid.
- Map any critical pages from your old site so residents can immediately reach your new site via search engines.
- Keep track of site metrics using the Insights Dashboard and Google Analytics.
We also encourage you to browse our help center and see what else you can do with your new website. Here are some sections to investigate: