Have you ever wondered what happens after you give your web designer the “OK” to go live?
The Technical Stuff
- DesignME Creative builds the developing website in a subdirectory of your domain – something like yourdomain.com/site. So the first step is to point change the General Settings within your WP dashboard to the real url (yourdomain.com) while leaving the installation url as it is.
- Next we to into the control panel file manager (this access is provided by the host company) and copy 2 files from the original install directory to the root of the website (this is typically public_html or www). We edit one line of code and save.
- Still inside the file manager, we briefly install a search & replace tool to ensure all the links that had the reference to /site now direct to the real url. We perform this on just the wp_posts table of the database. This is often a two step process because, although we replace all /site/ references in the table, we need to then make sure anything that has /wp-content/uploads still references the /site … so we also perform that extra search and replace before removing the temporary file.
- We now go back and log back into your WP installation (into your website dashboard) and update the permalinks settings and save.
Although your site is now “live”, DesignME Creative Group isn’t finished yet.
Search Engine Stuff
- If you have a new site. we register your domain name with major search engines: Google, Yahoo!, Bing. We don’t use automatic submission programs – we manually submit your url to make sure it’s done right!
- If this was an upgrade or redesigned website, we would set up permanent redirects (301 redirects) to let the search engines know that your pages may have changed.
- We use Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics to submit a site map and to install tracking information.
The Other Stuff
- 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 widget 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!
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