Basic marketing things you need to do when you launch a new website

Launching, or re-launching, your website, is a big deal. It takes time, money, and resources to plan, design, build and market your website, so when you decide to do it, you need to make sure you’re making the most of it – and doing it for the right reasons. 

Here are 4 things that the team feels you absolutely must prioritise when launching a website. 

Your customer’s needs should be driving your website

Sometimes we just want something new and shiny. There’s no judgement here, we get it. But just because you’ve had your website for a couple of years, it doesn’t mean you should be changing it on a whim. Remember, much like a post or mailout, your website is not for you!

Your customer needs to be the priority for any marketing decision you make, and your website needs to follow the same principles. Is what you’re doing adding value or making a meaningful difference to their experience? Your website is a core component of the marketing funnel, guiding and supporting the user on their journey to completing a particular action.

On the subject of user journeys, these should be the very first thing you plan. Yes, seriously. Before you start thinking about brand colours and fancy designs, you should be wireframing the user journey, and mapping it against the core expectations a user might have when visiting your website. For example, are they there to make a purchase, find out information such as opening hours, or do you see your website as a lead generator, therefore requiring the user to submit contact details. 

Plan the journey first, and make sure it’s meeting the needs of the customer. Everything else should be built around that ethos. 

Before you launch your website, test everything!

Imagine this. You’ve spent months perfecting your new web design, getting it built and creating your new marketing campaign. You finally press the button to go live with the site and messages start to come in from your audience. But rather than celebrating a successful launch, they’re saying that they’re getting 404s, dropdown filters aren’t working, the menu is bugging out and that discount code you sent out to your mailing list isn’t being accepted on your store. What should have been a great day has instead been dampened by a flawed launch. 

The best way to avoid that is to test everything before you launch. Not just a quick skim, but a full team scrutinisation of the site in staging, on multiple devices and browsers. Yes, you can also use automated testing like Lighthouse, Axe, and other scripts, but user testing will always throw up unexpected errors. Make the most of your team’s expertise; if you’re including a mailing list or collecting contact details, bring your CRM expert into conversations, and ensure a copywriter or content lead has looked at your copy. 

By putting the website in the hands of real people—especially if they’re not part of the development team—you can also observe how they interact with the site, how easy they find it to get information, and whether the user journey is obscured by complicated design. 

Don’t neglect SEO and analytics

As we said, your website needs to be focused on meeting the needs of the customer. If you’re relaunching your website, you likely already have an idea of how the end-user is interacting with your website through your analytics. That data can be really helpful in seeing where people are bouncing off your site, and where they spend the most time, and should be used to inform your design. If you can fix the problem points and keep people on your site for longer, you’re more likely to make the conversion – and provide a better user experience.  

For those who are launching their first website, the importance of SEO and analytics cannot be overstated. SEO, or search engine optimisation, is a set of principles that your web pages should follow so as to be placed higher on search engine results pages. This will significantly help your organic traffic. Some things you can do to improve your SEO include optimising your metadata, creating high-quality unique content, and using relevant keywords. 

Analytics are equally important, and can give valuable insights into how your website is performing, the types of traffic it is attracting, and where people are getting stuck or leaving. Google Analytics is typically seen as the industry standard, but we have a list of alternatives if Google isn’t your cup of tea. 

One thing to note if you are relaunching your website is that there can be negative impacts to your search engine rankings as well as positive. If you change the URL structure of your site without properly implementing 301 redirects, you will lose the value of your old URLs which could then see you drop down the page rankings. Similarly, if you have broken links or duplicate content, then you also risk being penalised by the crawlers. This is why a thorough test of your site prior to launch is crucial, as it will throw up a lot of these issues. 

Do not neglect mobile

In an increasingly mobile-first world, you need to ensure that your website performs well on mobile as well as desktop browsers. This means building a site that loads quickly even on slower data connections, having touch-friendly assets and text that scales to a smaller screen, and generally having a design that is responsive to the display it’s appearing on. 

That said, responsive design doesn’t mean you can’t get creative with your website. Too often we see mobile websites that just stack all the elements in one exceedingly long column, and while that may be the norm, we don’t believe it represents a good user experience. People get tired of scrolling, and the content at the bottom of your page will rarely be seen because people will bounce off before then. 

It comes back to that central tenet—put your customer first. In the design stage of your website, think how it’s going to interact on mobile, and how that is going to impact the user journey and experience. 

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Your website shouldn’t be a static asset; it should be tweaked and evolved over time in response to data and customer feedback. That, in some ways, should take the pressure off of your launch. As long as the core functions of your website work, you can request feedback from your users and refine it over time. This is a journey, and involving your audience in that will ensure you are meeting their needs. 

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