Top 7 Strategies for a Successful Website Launch

Launching a website isn't that hard. Launching a successful one is. 

Before talking about the strategies for a successful website launch, I want to elaborate on what do I mean by a Successful launch. I will talk about the key elements of a successful website and then go into how to do that, sounds good? Let's go.

Key elements of a successful website

Here is what I think should be present in a website so we can call it's launch successful. 

Seamless User Experience

It's UI is visually appealing and you can get where you want with as few clicks as possible. Users that come to the website either want information or they want to do something. A successful website usually makes it easy for users to reach them.

Technical Quality

A successful launch needs technical quality. It needs an efficient web development practice which can result in fast load times, security and scalability.

SEO and visibility infrastructure

Off course a newly launched website won't be high ranked in google but it should have the infrastructure and the ability to do so.

Marketing effort

Having the infrastructure to implement marketing goals inside a website is important but having an all around marketing plan is more important. You should at least have a user persona and a plan to reach them through your online presence.

Rapid improvement

It's not directly related to your first launch but it's worth mentioning that you can't think of everything in your first release. Users will have demands, even you will have new requirements and thoughts, a successful website is always ready to change.

So now that we now what are the pillars of a successful website launch let's get into the 'How' of it.

1. Have a plan for launching your website

A successful website's journey starts before coding and implementing the technical stuff. You should determine who is your audience and what you want to achieve. Everything from UI design to the content written on your webpages should reflect that. This goals might be:

Brand awareness

 letting people know who you are and what you do

Generating Leads

 Getting information of your potential customers and their preferences

Selling stuff

 A website is one of the best places to sell products

Support your customers

to make it easier to connect to your already connected customers

Now let's talk about the steps for planning a website.

Note that planning a website is different from planning a business, I always say that do not rely on a website as a business, it should be a way to reach and serve your potential customers not a whole business. And the reason for that is when you rely on it as a business you miss many important elements of creating a business plan such as customer relations, HR, potential related supporting business that can help you achieve your goal and more importantly you miss other platforms that can help boost or accompany a website.

Anyway I try to mix the technical and marketing steps in the coming section about planning a website with a hint of project management in mind so you can do well if you are new to digital world.

Create a detailed project plan

There are many methods to acquire one. But the output of all of them is a plan that determines what should happen and when. So your plan needs to have milestones, deadlines, tasks that are needed to be done and the people who should do it.

A website before anything is a piece of software so it should have the steps of a software production process which is: Analysis, Design, implementation, testing and deploy. You can read more about in this related article mobile app development life cycle in which my colleagues talked about the phases of a mobile app which directly applicable to websites too.

Research your competition

Unless your website offers something so unique that nobody ever has offered before, you will have competition. You need to check how they are conducting business, how and where they are reaching their audience and how you first reach and then improve that.

It even may help you to choose your design differently In some pages.

Requirement specification

This whole first step of this topic (Planning) is about knowing your goals. Knowing that goals can make you determine what can hurt that goal. That will be a risk! And how to address those risk? That is risk management plan.

Risk doesn't need to be a disaster. Say your goals is to sell medical glasses. Then your potential customers won't have the greatest eye sight would day? And your customer not seeing your web pages clearly would be a thing that can hurt that goal. Then it's a risk. And how do you manage that risk? Making your fonts a bit bigger and the contrast of website a bit stronger. That's an actionable step in your risk management plan.

But to do something like that you need a list of your goals and customer requirement. That's why you need a document for that. For a normal website it doesn’t need to be very detailed or long like a SaaS project's Requirement specification document. But it needs to exist, even if it's just 2 pages. You'll thank me later 😉

Budgeting plan

The cost of a website doesn't start or end with development and deployment. If you want google presence you need SEO. If you talk to a SEO manager he needs to put content writers on your website and that costs money. Better to think about before the launch than after, if not your website will be up and running with no content or months and no one would take it seriously.

And SEO was just and example, maybe you need technical people who can answer tickets, maybe your products demand another kind of cost. Make sure to think about all of these things before just launching a website and waiting for customers. In this step consulting an expert in this field never hurts.

Now we reach step two, the first thing user sees. User interface.

2. Having an Exceptional UI and UX (Unless you work for government)

If you are not visually appealing users probably won't stay long, that goes for UX too. Unless you are building a governmental website that's offering a service that only government can offer and you have no competition, users don't have to use your website. So we need to make it eye catching, easy to use and fast loading.

Here is some step towards that, but for a deeper knowledge I offer you to read strategies to have a user friendly website article.

I briefly list the things you need to do here, so you can tick the boxes:

Responsive design

Make sure your website looks pretty on all devices. Use the google insight tools to check that so you can see Google's rating on your mobile design.

Clean layout

 This is one is a judgement call but usually websites that are cluttered don't work out in the long run, unless they are doing something very specific like graphiti or splash painting in your services, stick to a clean and approachable layout.

Colors should reflect branding

Colors should have consistency with your branding purposes. Graphic designers can help you with that.

Pay attention to your branding tone

Sentences, buttons and all the text that are in your website should be serving your branding tone. This all comes from your customer personal and the goals that we talked about in the first step.

Be fast, please

Your website should be fast, you know why. End of story <3

3. Have a scalable and robust technical infrastructure

If you are a website owner most of the elements about your technical stuff is probably out of your control. Either because you are using a CMS like WordPress which is not really open up to new technology options or because you don't have enough knowledge to have a say in the technology that your development team is using, so I try to point out the things that you can control.

Choose a well-known hosting provider

Choose a reliable hosting provider specially if you don't fully trust your development team and their judgement. Preferably a hosting that has options to scale your business website later. Although a fairly ok developer can relocate your infrastructure anywhere, but still it's better to have the options of scaling than not.

Use a CDN

Ask your developers to use Content delivery networks like Cloudflare or google, it's good for performance and security as well. 

Test availability

Again, if you have a trusted web development team your don't need to worry about that by if you want you can use tools like gtmetrix, Pingdom etc. to test the availability of the host you got.

Have SEO options

If you are using a WordPress website make sure to install normal SEO plugins like Yoast etc. and if you have a custom build website although you are already ahead of common CMS website in case of speed, performance and security, you need to make sure you have the right tags and options implemented in your website.

Check your webpages with online tools like SEMrush and ahrefs and notify the development team about any problems or warning your encounter.

Security concerns

Make sure to run a penetration test on your website, it's not a successful launch if you get attacked or defaced every now and then. I strongly recommend to use experts for this and not trust some online random security tool or addon.

After taking care of technical infrastructure, it's time to pay attention to what users actually see on the website.

4. Create and optimize content for SEO

Content is what makes google take you seriously. And unless you are running a internal or private web applications for a specific use or company, you want to make goods with google.

I will share some tips here, but for a deeper understanding of implementing SEO on websites I recommend you to read how to increase a website engagement rate for SEO in less than an hour, it's updated for 2025 and gives you a good understanding of what google is looking for in website.

So how to make the content of your website ready for a successful website launch.

Research the keywords

It all comes down the first step, planning. If you do that right you'll have no problem here. You already should know who is your customer and what is he/she looking for. Do a bit of research and use online tools to know what phrases or keywords your customers are interested to hear about and what are they searching.

Create content!

Create content that addresses the requirement of your users. Use blogs, videos, infographics and whatever you see fit. Just remember fact check before releasing if you are creating informing or educating contents.

Regular content update

Have a plan for keeping your contents fresh, specially those contents that are expirable. Like when you are introducing top tools or website for a specific field. Use the power of your old hit contents to increase your visibility.

5. Test like an idiot

Use your website like you have a 40 IQ score. Everything must be easy to use. If you don't find an options or a page you want under 15 seconds it's probably a design problem. If somethings glitches that's a problem. If something takes too long to load that's a problem. Do not be shy about talking about this to your development team. If you see a problem your users probably will see that too and there is no say what they might think of you or your brand after seeing a button becoming unclickable for 10 seconds or a logo flying over a page due to a glitch.

Most of these test are for the web development team to do but I list them anyway.

There are 3 types of testing that can help you check your site out:

Functional testing

Imagine your website is capable of doing 20 different things. Do all this 20 things, test all the functionalities that you are offering your clients. Even if it's just reading a blog or writing a comment. 

Cross browser test: 

It's when you use different browsers to check if your website will work fine in all of them. 

Cross device test: 

Do the same with bunch of devices. If you don't have access to multiple devices just check with your browser in development mode. 

Performance test

Use gtmetrix and similar tools as I said in the last strategy and make your development team to perform a stress test if possible. 

User acceptance test

Launch a beta website and ask a small group of real users to use and comment on your website. You'd be amazed what a normal internet user have to offer in terms of improving your user interface or other functionalities.  

6. Monitor the website

Having a monitoring routine is very important in terms of finding bugs and user rooted exceptions early on. Your first launch of the website will not be bugfree. In 11 years of programming I've never seen a bug-free website or software let alone in the first launch. So you need to be prepared to get those bugs before your clients do, at least before all of them do. Here is how to do it

Have a global error notification

Ask your developers to implement error handling in this way: if any exceptions or errors or failed requests occurred in the system, the technical team must the first to know, either through email or in system notifications. The logs most be categorized in atleast three levels:

• Informational: the things that are only have informational value
• Warning: the things that might be the result of a bug in the system
• Error: the things that we didn’t expect to happen

They can have their own terminology but this logs are important for you to be able to monitor the health of your newly launched website. 

7. Do not give up

It's doesn't sound like a strategy, but it's important. Don't give up on your website. Most websites do not see success in terms of users or payments in the first few months. The worst mistake you can do is to let go of best practices and the other strategies we talked about just because you are not seeing result.

Keep testing your website, conduct A/B testing on modules that customer don't like. Make content. update your infrastructure and talk to experts in marketing and web development so you have a realistic expectation of your website.

Conclusion

Using this 7 strategies will make your website better than half of the websites that already are up. Seriously. Just adjust your expectation, keep up the good work. And have a good digital life <3