From speaking with our clients and partners, this is a situation that comes up often and if not handled correctly can go sideways fast. Not only do you need to conciser the possible SEO damage it can cause if the website goes down but also the relationship and trust you built with your client.
There are many factors to conciser when setting up a good website launch date.
- Day of the week
- Time of the day
- Holidays
- Employee Time off
- Workload Overload
- Team Communication
- Client Communication
One of the most common issues everyone has when launching a website is that it comes close towards the end of the week.
If you or your company does not operate on weekends, then you should schedule your launches at the beginning of the week. Preferably a Monday.
Last thing you need is an angry call from your client while your out and about enjoying the weekend.
Launching at the beginning of the week will give your technical team enough time to catch any flukes or mistakes. A lot goes behind the scenes with DNS entries, so there is a possibility that a service could go down, such as emails, sub domains, security scanners, or worse: networks that your client relies on within the DNS.
It is always good to plan the DNS entries ahead of time, before you make the switch.
Another factor to consider is time of day. This is the same principle as above. If you are out of the office at 6pm. DO NOT LAUNCH at 5:30pm. You should always value your client first, and launch at a proper time.
Having enough time will also allow your marketing team or person to catch any SEO mistakes that might have sneaked through the QA process. It happens and we have seen it plenty of times.
The same is true for holidays. Who needs chaos when you are trying to enjoy your well deserved time off.
Another important factor to consider other than timing, is workload and worker. Like stated before, DNS entries can get tricky, and if you only have 1 person handling launches, then mistakes can easily happen. Especially if that person is under a heavy amount of workload. No human can multitask, it has been scientifically proven.
To minimize the amount of possible errors or down-time on your new launch, you should be able to easily distribute the workload among teammates.
COMMUNICATION! This one is the #1 rule to a successful website launch. At-least in our opinion. It not only makes you look bad, but also unreliable to your client if not one person on the team knows when the website should be launched.
It does not matter who is responsible for the actual launch process. If you or one of your team mates has communication with the client, they should properly know when to expect the launch to happen.
I have seen it multiple times. Teams are not on the same page and are either communicating wrong data or unprepared to perform tasks upon the launch of the website.
There are plenty more factors to consider, but these are the ones that hold all human mistakes and the easiest to fix with proper training and communication.
Do you have pain-points when launching your websites? Drop a comment below and lets gossip a bit about it.
