Top 10 Mistakes to Avoid Before Carrying Website Deployment Process

Web Development

When we are going to develop a website, we are spending a lot of time and resources to make it a masterpiece to serve our purposes. Once it finishes, we are in the exciting mood. However, our sentiment is joyous but may lead to some minor yet diminishing mistakes. Those may cost us dearly especially when we have allocated a big budget to create a deployment buzz in the market at the time of releasing the site, and unveiling the curtain over our hard work. Today we are going to pinpoint those minute but crucial mistakes and hope that by avoiding it, you may have delightful website deployment process and capable of reaping the sweet fruits of real endeavors. In due course, we have segregated top 10 mistakes to avoid before publishing website out of several possibilities of committing such errors.  

#1: Not Correcting Robots.txt File before Website Deployment

When web developers in an outsourcing company or freelancer developers working on the offshore projects, take help of development server provided by most of the hosting services including cloud hosting. In order to avoid indexing of the website under the development on staging servers, web developers are setting ‘Robots.txt’ file with ‘Disallow’ credential and stop the search engines to list the web pages in SERPs and traffic to enter except the selected users including clients and web development team. When the entire process of development is finishing, and time to deploy website on the public web hosting servers come, the web developers need to change the Robots.txt file from ‘Disallow’ to ‘Allow/Index’ status and permit bots to crawl the website quickly. Unfortunately, our over exciting mood comes into the way, and we almost forget to change the Robots.txt file in several web pages, if not the entire site. Such small mistake can wash out our investment over the launch time marketing campaign, and we miss the SEO benefits at all.  

#2: Missing Analytics Code before Website Deployment

The same story may go to happen in the case of entering analytics code, particularly Google Analytics code in recommended places of the each web pages. In order to collect the website traffic data and publishing reports, we have to enter the analytics code of Google, Bing, and other major search engines at designated places in the source code of the web pages of the entire website by setting their required strings. In over excitement state or under pressure to hit the deadline of deployment of a website, developers sometimes forget to obtain the analytics code and enter appropriately in the source code. Moreover, setting goal tracking parameter also missing in several instances if the code entered. It costs our SEO dearly without tracking the web traffic and concluding how our unveiling campaign hit the success online. Before we go further you might be have a question about What is the best way to hire a web developer team in India? Addon Solutions offers top web developers on an hourly, part-time or full-time contract basis or project based set up your own remote team.  

#3: Not Testing Browser Compatibility before Website Deployment

Our general perception regarding the QA or testing stage is that we accomplish all tests during that phase. Unfortunately, practically it is tough to carry all tests of browser and OS compatibility by checking each facet of the website i.e. design, programming, and UX journey. Thus, smart and seasoned web developers follow the website deployment best practices. They check the browser compatibility frequently during the development process and at the end of each significant stage of development. Thus, they can address the designing and coding issues upfront. Another mistake in the case of browser compatibility is happening with the types of browsers. Web developers are spending 90% time with Chrome, Firefox/Mozilla, and IE and also carrying testing in between these selected browsers. Unfortunately, the reality is different and many organizations are banning or preferring some high-end paid browsers for the sake of security issues. Therefore, the chances are high that the truncated display of your website on those avoided browsers, particularly during the testing phase, may spoil you SEO and marketing targets. Moreover, mobile browsers are challenging to test and in the range so make a list of desktops and mobile browsers to check the display, performance, and get done best design with your website before deploying on live servers.  

#4: Checking Site Scalability before Website Deployment

The big scale and futuristic web development projects are executing differently and come live as Minimum Viable Product (MVP) due to short timeline prescribed. When developers are missing the testing the scalability of various components of the web application when the organization grows with the pace of time, it demands redesign or recreation from scratch in the future. Therefore, checking the scalability of databases, resources, and functionality when any migration from traditional servers to cloud servers takes place. Sometimes, locating the databases and growing resources on remote storage like servers/cloud can provide the best solution. In such cases, web developers have to check the scalability issues prior to releasing MVP web applications or go ahead on website deployment steps.  

#5: Not Changing the URLs before Website Deployment

Just like Robots.txt, developers forget to optimize the web page URL of the each page of the site and once the site is ready to deploy on the live server. Custom URL of the web pages are vital for the SEO ranking so take care of each page. If you are redesigning the site, use redirect page technique to grab the SEO juice of the older pages.  

#6: Not Ready for SEO before Website Deployment

Many website owners either do not hire SEO professionals/team to check and implement SEO techniques right from the website development stage or hire immature SEO developers to do wrong SEO. In such cases, your site may miss the SEO treatments at all when the time comes to make it live or becomes the victim of wrong SEO treatment and losing SEO ranking once it lives and indexed. Hire highly experienced SEO team and look after the basic to advanced SEO tasks they carry on the site. Check Metadata, Keywords and keyword density, content layout and quality of content, the uniqueness of texts and multimedia content, backlink strategies, and performance of the website with actual users.  

#7: Not Optimizing Bandwidth Usage before Website Deployment

Development servers never mimic the live site due to remote connections and missing the connectivity issues. Therefore, web developers have hardly any idea regarding connectivity and bandwidth issues during the development stages working on the development server. Go to live servers for the test before releasing the website and check the site speed, performance, load balancing capabilities, user experiences, and connectivity related issues. If you have not optimized images and video like multimedia content, do so. Use minifying technologies for CSS and JavaScript like highly used scripts. Applying server-side HTTP and HTTPS compression is suitable for the optimization of bandwidth usage. Using sprite techniques and caches on both sides can improve performance considerably.  

#8: Not Mobile Friendly

We are living in a mobile era, and almost 70% audience comes through mobile devices on the business websites or ecommerce sites. Moreover, search engines have made mobile-friendly website development compulsory to gain SEO ranking. Therefore, modern website development team has to learn how to create a mobile-friendly website using responsive web design and other techniques to deliver native-like mobile touch experiences. Web developers must test the website on a broad range of smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops to assure seamless user experiences of your mobile-friendly website.  

#9: Not Planned for Portability

When you are going to port your website from the development server to live server, you need to check issues regarding portability and take robust tests instead of just relying on the assumptions. You need to test your website or web application in a live server environment and check scalability and load-balancing in multiple server settings. Use a single configuration file to make straightforward and clear configuration and handle exceptions in the case when server configuration denied.  

#10: Not Taking Backup of Site & Data Properly before Website Deployment

When you port your website from the staggering server to live server on the web, chances are high to crash or modification in your database of the website. Therefore, it is best practice to take backup of the entire website along with the databases and other resources attached.  

Conclusion:

Now, we come to know the top 10 mistakes to avoid while making your website live on hosting server. Of course, there are plenty of other possibilities to commit such errors, but our listed errors are common and happen in several cases. However, highly experienced and expert team of web developers are hardly committing such mistakes and work with planning and tandem with charted schedule to eliminate such errors before those are occurring. Fortunately, Addon Solutions has the team you dream for your next website development project and ensure your success while you cross the development stages and reaching on the deployment of website.