Top 3 tasks to complete to ensure a successful website launch

A successful product launch for a new website is not an easy process to get right. Here are the top 3 things that I've triple checked recently to make sure I'm on track and things are working for my website!

Background

I spent 3 years building my project SplitMyExpenses in my free time, but now that the launch is close, the focus shifts from feature building to feature stabilization. In that shift, I've dialed in on a few key areas to make sure I know things are working, I know when things aren't working, and I know my customers can purchase once they are interested.

Step 1: Check how the site looks on Google and OpenGraph images

Visit https://seositecheckup.com/analysis and enter your website URL. You'll see how the site looks by parsing meta tags. There are many specifics about optimal length for title, and description. Feel free to ignore the meta keywords tag, since Google is a bit more advanced now and uses your page content and structure to figure out what keywords you should rank for.

Go to https://www.opengraph.xyz/ and enter your website URL. You will see how your site will look when shared with others over SMS, iMessage, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. These sites all fetch the page and look at meta tags to show this preview, see this SEO guide for more info: https://seosetups.com/blog/open-graph/

Step 2: Ensure error reporting and monitoring is working as expected

While your site doesn't have much traffic, you should:
Deploy a broken change to take down the homepage... how long does it take for you to know? Do you have alerting and monitoring in place? I use Sentry for error reporting, and it works great. I use OhDear for application monitoring (uptime, cron check, etc.).

Also, have a specific flow of your site throw an error. You can do this by simply raising an error in your language of choice. Deploy your change and hit that code path. Ensure this exception makes it to your error reporting service/tracker, so you are notified when things go wrong!

Step 3: Have a friend purchase and test your payments flow

Everyone wants to make their first online dollars, but if you haven't tested in production, you really need to before a public launch. Ask a friend to purchase and test your end to end flow. While we develop our applications, we usually test in sandbox or testing environments, especially with payment providers like Stripe, Paddle, or PayPal.

Things can go wrong with the production environment if it's not set up correctly, for example on Stripe you need to copy over your products from staging to production! You can also thank your friend for being your first paying customer :)

Conclusion

You can never be fully ready, but ensuring you follow these steps help to make you more prepared. Launch is just a launch, but it's important to have a good first impression and these steps will get you closer.