"Going Live" -

Have you ever wondered what happens after you give your web designer the “OK” to go live?

DesignME Creative builds the developing website in a subdirectory of your domain – something like yourdomain.com/dev. So the first step is to change the Settings within your WP dashboard and installation url to the real url (yourdomain.com). This can be a little scary because your new site then closes and shows us an error – but that’s ok, it’s temporary.
Next we log to into the control panel file manager (this access is provided by the host company). If you have an old site in place, we move all those files into a subdirectory (typically we create one called “ORIGSITE” or something like that. Then the root directory (this is typically public_html or www) is ready for your new site and we move all your files from the temporary development directory (/dev) to the root directory of the website.
Now we go back to your real url (yourdomain.com). Don’t worry if the images and urls aren’t working yet – we still have some work to do! We login to your dashboard and briefly install a search & replace tool. The plugin “Better Search Replace” is our favorite tool for this step. We can now replace all instances of the development url with the live url within the database with ease.
The final step in your dashboard is to uncheck the “do not index” fro the Settings > Reading tab (which is checked during installation) and update/save the Permalink structure (Settings > Permalinks).

Although your site is now “live”, DesignME Creative Group isn’t finished yet.

If you have a new site, we register your on Google Analytics and get a tracking code that is installed on your website. We also submit a sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools which helps Google see the content on your website.
For a site that had an upgrade or redesign, we would set up permanent redirects (301 redirects) to let the search engines know that your pages may have changed. We also ensure that any Google tracking code you may have had is inserted into your new site.

Test Test Test! Yes, we retest the entire site, trying all links, viewing it on different devices, to make sure nothing “broke” in the transfer.
A caching plugin is usually installed to speed up your page load times. What does that mean? Cached pages are stored on your server as html and PHP files and updated at intervals. This allows those pages that are static to load faster because there is a copy “stored” for the visitor.
Keep an eye on overall performance. We want you to succeed!