Perhaps the most boring blog post of all time, but here’s the tasks we do on a typical website build.
As many of these are not seen by the client we are sharing for transparency.
Basic set up tasks
- Set up a domain name record (for the development site)
- Create space on the server
- add security certificate
- Set up database
- Set the PHP version
- Install WordPress
- Set time zones
- Add coming soon page
- Create user accounts for all
- Send Account passwords securely
- Delete the standard plugins and theme (leaving the newest theme as fallback)
- Delete sample pages and post
- Install premium themes and plugins
- Activate Licence key for all premium software
- Setup transactional email system to send emails from the server
- Configure SEO plugin
- Configure WordPress security plugins (firewall, alerts and scans)
- Make the site connect to our master maintenance site
- Add up-time monitoring
- Set up site backup schedules
- Set up Project Management System and personalise on boarding.
- Customise image cropping
- Clear Stencil’s image library account and set a new password for the client’s use
- Configure automatic image automation to the sites requirements.
- Reset Userback for client design feedback
- Set up blog (if needed)
- Customise blog comments setting to the site requirements
- Add blog spam protection
- Set up Forms (spam protection, email notification GDPR settings )
- Test forms
- Add Analytics code
- Anonymize Google Analytic (as appropriate)
- Check WordPress permalinks
- Add social share
- Set up Newsletter subscriptions
- Change all post and pages made by us is set to the client’s account
- Optimise database (clear revisions, transient data and any orphan database tables)
- Check server resources used (High RAM resources or long Time to First Byte issues)
Basic design tasks
- Add Favicon
- Create Pages
- Create custom 404 (ie. page not found)
- Create a custom privacy page to GDPR standards.
- Create and thank you pages and connect to forms
- Set up WordPress menus
- Set site header and text fonts
- Save brand colours to the theme and page builder
- Set up Header layouts
- Set up footer layout (with Copyright details)
- Set up Search layouts
- Set up blog ( any other dynamic achieve pages)
- Set up blog singular pages
- Basic Browser testing (Chrome Firefox and Microsoft’s Edge)
- Basic mobile and tablet responsiveness
Launch tasks
- Set DNS record for the new domain
- Turn off “coming soon” page
- Check robot txt (allow search engines to crawl)
- Set www and non www redirects
- Rewrite the database to the new domain
- The security certificates working on all pages and post (no mixed content)
- Configure and test caching for speed
- Check forms again
- Add page caching and test speeds
- Take external back-up.