As eager as you might be to take your site live, it’s imperative that before going live, you test and retest your site’s design and functionality elements. Site functionality, user experience, and on-page SEO are all elements that are essential to your site’s ability to perform its main job--securing leads and customers for your business. They are also the areas where most small business websites develop glitches. Before you launch, test the following elements carefully.

1. Site Functionality: Measurement Tools

Quick--how are you measuring your site’s performance? If you don’t have measurement tools installed, you won’t be able to gauge just how well or poorly your site is doing. Make sure you have placed your chosen analytics package code on the site and that it is accurately measuring visits, time spent on page, and other site metrics.

2. User Experience: Forms

Forms are among your website’s most important tools. They help businesses capture leads and build lists of potential customers interested in the company. Before you launch, you should check every form for the following:
a. Relevance: Does it make sense for the form to be on its current page? Is the incentive offered, such as a white paper, contact form, etc., complementary to the content on that page?
b. Clarity: Are the form instructions easy to understand?
c. Brevity: Are you asking only for the essential information you need to follow up on your lead? For every field added to a form, the amount of users who will convert drops dramatically. Remember, you can always ask for additional information later in the relationship if you need it.
d. Functionality: Is the collected form information sent to the right place in your organization, such as your CRM or business development executive?
e. Finality: Upon completion of the form, can the user successfully access the offered incentive? Is it the correct asset as promised in the form header and instructions?

3. SEO: Live URLs

Usually, websites are built on a development server, with a different uniform resource locator (URL), or Web address, than the one they will have when launched. When a site launches, the URLs are all changed over from that staging area. Every single URL on your site needs to be tested when the site goes live to make sure they lead to the correct destination. This is important from both a functionality standpoint and for SEO purposes; visitors will get frustrated, and search engines will penalize your site if these URLs are incorrect.

Wrangling all of the moving parts that need to come together to make a beautiful, functional business website can be daunting. There are many areas that need to be tested repeatedly before your site is ready to launch, but these three are great places to start. The bugs and glitches that come from these elements are often the most damaging to a small business’s site performance, so get out there and start testing!