Is Your Ecommerce Site Ready to Go Live?

When it comes to doing business on the internet, the reputation and subsequent success of your business will be based to a large extent on the perceived and actual quality of your website. Many website owners lose out on business simply because a small detail on their website was not right and this eventually turned away many potential customers. Therefore, every single detail of your website must be confirmed before giving the ‘go live’ approval to your ecommerce web hosting service. That way, anyone who comes to your website will be more convinced on the credibility of your website. Don’t focus on the major things and forget the small things as even the seemingly minor things can cost you business. The following checklist is great way to check that everything is alright prior to giving your web hosting service provider the go ahead.

Confirm your website images

Before giving the go ahead to your ecommerce web hosting service, it is important that you ensure all images are correctly referenced and positioned. If your images do not load correctly, they give a very bad impression about your website and by extension your business. Try avoiding very bulky images as these will slow down the loading speed of your website. If your website has many images and you need to keep updating more, ensure that your web hosting service provider factors in this additional space when it is required.

Proofread your web content

Read through all your content to ensure that there are no grammatical or typographical errors. Ensure that your website layout comes across as neat and professional. Use moderate and consistent formatting throughout the website. Do not go overboard with emphasized text such as bold, italic, red colored fonts or exclamation marks as this may make your visitors lose confidence in your site. Pick a nice looking professional font and try and keep to it throughout your website.

Test with all browsers

Ensure that you test access to your website on all the common browsers including Mozilla, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Opera, Netscape and Safari to establish that your website works well on each. It is quite possible to have your website work properly with one browser and still be dysfunctional on another.

Confirm your links

This is another issue that you must address before allowing your ecommerce web hosting service to move your website to live. It can potentially kill any visitor’s interest in your website. Clicking on a link and getting a ‘Page not found’ error is an absolute no-no. Same applies to a link that leads to the wrong page. Depending on the size of your website, counter checking all links might seem like an overly arduous process. But it is something that you must do. You can even get someone else to check your website on your behalf.

Test your shopping cart

The reason for setting up an ecommerce website is to buy and sell products. Your shopping card not working correctly or not working at all is a big deal. This should be one area you must focus on and test again and again to make sure it works correctly in all kinds of scenarios. Place a dummy order and go through the entire process from the point of placing an order to the time the transaction is passed to your bank or credit card account. You should test before the web hosting service goes live and after it is live.

Check Your Website Scripts

If your website is running Java, PHP, CGI or any other scripts, the scripts must run as required. Take a look at your discussion forums and your website’s search function to confirm each is functioning well. In case a visitor keys in an erroneous command on your website, it should display a friendly error report and not display a technical error report or even crash the website. The error message should provide too much technical information as this is one loophole used by hackers to understand the architecture of your website.

Confirm Your Contact Details

Your contact details must be up to date. If someone needs to get in touch with you whether on phone, fax, email or by visiting your office if you have one, the data on the website should be detailed enough to make you quickly reachable. Even though you are relying on an ecommerce web hosting service for your website, people still feel more comfortable when dealing with someone with a reachable address as opposed to someone whose only contact is an email address.

Pace Work Technologies is a fast web hosting company and a domain registration company.