Site Release Checklist
When you thought you were finished…
Site organisation
I’m going to assume you built it like you want it. But search engines care.
URL Strategy
Sounds minor? Some CMS set URL strategy, so you work with what is given. But other web software like frameworks do not set their strategy—you can adjust the URLs. Also, there may be adjustments that can be made, perhaps through modules, for example to generate short URLs. If URL strategy can be changed, then set it now. The reason for making this a key consideration is that changing afterwards will not only be potentially a lot of work, but changes will take time to spread through web caches and search engine links. The professional way of saying this is something like, “Changing URLs will damage your SEO, cause loss of rankings, and have a negative impact on your business”. That’s not always true, but URL changes will be a big job that can obscure the profile of a working website.
404/500 error pages
A reminder that if you want to customize error pages, now is probably the time you will do that.
Favicon
Have you got one? There’s some general information in Favicons.
Mobile‐friendly
Google came right out with it, they’re going to favour sites that adapt to different devices. So at least get yourself some basic media queries. And try the site on a few browsers. Google Mobile test.
Search‐friendly
HTML layout
Are you writing a sensible title attribute in every page header? It should go there as well as visually on every page. The attribute is used by search engines, and also appears in browser tabs.
Are you writing a sensible meta description into at least pages with content? This is what search engines will use for their tag lines, unless they despair of your content, or lack of it. Here’s EBay’s,
<meta name="description" content="Buy & sell electronics, cars, clothes, collectibles & more on eBay, the world's online marketplace. Top brands, low prices & free shipping on many items.">
If you want to go further, you can load pages with microformat data, but you probably know if you want/need to do that or not.
Talk to search engines
In order of importance,
Canonical URL strategy
You think I’m kidding. No, I am not. Modern search‐engines care about repeated URLs, so work hard to filter them out. If search‐engines don’t trust the approach of your site they will decide their own URLs. So write meta header tags. And, no, a sitemap (see below) will work only on the most basic site/deployment setups. Even if you are using a CMS, don’t trust it, check it has a strategy—if there is none install a module to get this fixed. Reason is, if search‐engines decide your URLs, and the URLs are inappropriate, it difficult to fix. Best fix is to work directly with the server. For some deployments, that’s impossible.
Sitemap
Got a sitemap? Once upon a time ‘sitemap’ meant an unused and useless visual gadget for boosting consultancy fees. But recently, 2018 or so, it’s a search engine reference—an XML file that points to URLs you want to highlight and give information about. Google info is you only need a sitemap if you top 500 pages or have some tricky sections on your site. I say, if you want search‐engine visibility, a sitemap is a must. It’s a file called ‘sitemap.xml’. Well, you know XML, something like this will do,
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
<url>
<loc>http://www.superduper.com/</loc>
<changefreq>never</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
</urlset>
Go modify.
Robots file
Got a robots file? This used to be how you talked to search engines. But now sitemaps have taken off, the robots file is mainly used to say where you don’t want search engines to look. It’s called ‘robots.txt’. Something like this will ask search engines to stay away from a URL or two
User-agent: *
# stay out of a set of places
Disallow: /grumpy/
# stay out of a targeted url
Disallow: /directory/damaged.html
# say where the sitemap is (works for some search-engine crawlers)
Sitemap: http://www.superduper.com/sitemap.xml
It used to be common to put silly comments in the robots file.
Both these files go in web root. Usually.
Speed
Search engines do care how fast and reliable your service is Google speed test (currently).
Images
Are the biggest drain on a server. And people love them. Not to mention videos. If you serve lots of images or videos, make sure you are doing your best to deliver them. Super‐tuned JPEGs etc.
Cache headers
Here it is—browsers can ask servers if anything has changed. If not, they can serve up what they have already downloaded and stored. Makes a lot of sense.
What the browser sends out is an If‐Modified‐Since header. So if this header arrives, it’s cool if the server can send back a ‘You got the current page!’ signal. Except there’s two kinds of requests can come in, ETag and last‐modified. ETag is a unique identifier, flexible in many ways, and not much used. Last modified makes simple with one piece of data.
Reason we are discussing this is because big search engines are fond of websites that can do this. Maybe your software can, maybe it can’t. It’s a lunge from the so‐called SEO of heaping keywords, to the algorithms of ETags, Modified‐since responses, and the Vary headers used by server caches. But have a look see if your software has ways of doing this.
Other
HTTPS
Search engines now favour sites which deliver through HTTPS or offer that as an alternative. Yes, the encryption of the webpage (that’s what HTTPS is) will slow the site. But even on a website of static content delivery, it will protect against snooping and the mildew of hacking. And, the point here, search engines like it.
Hosting and deployment list
Roughly what you need to get there,
A domain
Server with some routing options for domains, static areas, etc.
SSH
HTTPS
Analytics
Sensible hardening
Mail/Social media (or a decision to enable later)
Backup
Testing
References
Google Webmmaster guidelines (Lordy, but the self‐inflation),
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/webmaster-guidelines
Google, is your site mobile‐friendly?
Wikipedia on sitemaps,
Django conditional responses,
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/topics/conditional-view-processing/