19 Checks Before Launching on Webflow (with Simple SEO Best Practices)

It's easy to rush parts of a site when you're on a tight deadline or just can't keep your finger off the publish button. Before anything else, check off these four:

As much as I hate to admit it, live sites often look slightly different on the web than in the Webflow Designer. You can triple-check flexbox alignments, margins, and font heights and still get a rough result.

Webflow has been called a beast, and the most minuscule style or interaction effect can throw a layout out of whack. I've seen sites bug out completely after looking perfect in preview mode. Be tireless about testing and you'll catch most errors.

Publish to a staging domain (like webflow.io) and make sure the site works on every device you own.

Test every time you publish. It saves you embarrassing questions from clients about stray placeholder images and test copy that made it to their homepage.

Especially on mobile. You can fix horizontal scroll by setting overflow to hidden and giving every section a max width of 100vw.

It's a near-universal interaction that makes navigation easier. Most logos should be clickable and point to the homepage.

Does the hamburger menu open and close properly when tapped? Check it on a real phone.

Some things can wait a few days. Publishing before your design is airtight is one of those things.

Unless you're building a fictional business, you or your client will want a custom domain. It signals legitimacy and security to your audience.

GoDaddy sells custom .coms for $12 a year. Shorter, more common words and phrases can cost hundreds or thousands as a URL. Be unique with your name and it'll be easier on your wallet.

Remember: your brand name is only as strong as your offering. There's no need to spend thousands on a domain for an untested product idea.

Domain naming is strategic for reasons few people realize:

Don't get nickel and dimed while buying your domain. You need the domain name and access to DNS management. Extra 'security features' are unnecessary in my experience, unless you're running a top secret cybersecurity startup.

Most websites need a host to be accessible 24/7. I use Webflow to host mine. They offer free hosting for beginners and small two-page projects, which is great for practice: you can post as many webflow.io sites as you want without spending a dime.

The catch is the free version lives on a .webflow.io domain. No client will want that, so get used to explaining that hosting a custom domain on Webflow costs at least $14 a month (about $179 a year). Paying yearly runs roughly 12% cheaper.

DNS records come with hosting a custom domain, and you need to configure them to connect that domain in Webflow. Every registrar has a 'Manage DNS' area somewhere; find it.

GoDaddy is the most straightforward provider for accessing and changing DNS records, if you can navigate the upsells. Square is fine too. WHOIS feels dated.

DNS can look like a foreign language the first few times. The safest route is to follow Webflow's video for GoDaddy domains step by step and do exactly what it says.

Webflow sites get an SSL certificate automatically when DNS is configured properly. Propagation can take several days, sometimes up to a week with some providers.

This step is big but easy to lose in the whirlwind of publishing. Before launching any site, go to Webflow Project Settings > Forms and confirm every form delivers to the right email address. If you don't regularly check the inbox receiving submissions, you may miss this error for a regrettably long time.

Name the form fields intuitively so your client can see exactly what category of information each submission contains. Fields can behave strangely when they're set to the wrong information type.

While you're on forms, think about conversion rate. Guide the user down the funnel to the call to action: place CTAs and forms at the end of the page, or right after the most convincing section.

These are non-negotiable if you want your pages to get clicked in search results.

The title tag is the title of your page as it appears in Google. Title tags are commonly optimized for click-through rate (clicks divided by impressions). A weak or generic title means fewer clicks per impression and missed leads. Craft one under about 70 characters that highlights a unique aspect of your business.

The meta description accompanies your title tag in search results. Google sometimes auto-fills it from your page content, and it's hard to tell when. Write a simple one that stays under the limit so it doesn't get cut off with an ellipsis.

URL slugs come after your domain, like organicallyseo.com/webflow-maintenance. SEO data suggests simple slugs containing the page's target keyword send positive signals to search engines.

There's a lot of noise around H1 tags. Through all the jargon, the takeaway is that the H1 is the jugular for telling Google what your page is about.

Title tags are your communication with users; headings are your beacons to search engines. Some claim your H1 should match your title tag exactly, but they serve different purposes, so an exact match rarely makes sense.

Your H1s, H2s, and H3s should contain researched keywords you've identified as having volume. And the H1 is the first thing a visitor sees on arrival, so be compelling. Design daringly.

Consider every audience when building a website. Proper contrast and color hues keep your content legible for people with visual impairments and astigmatism.

Coolors.co has a contrast checker and a color blindness simulator, and you can review complementary colors there as well.

Every website should have a sitemap and a robots.txt file. Webflow generates the sitemap for you: go to Project Settings > SEO tab and check the box. You may need to set up the robots.txt manually.

Set up Search Console immediately after your site goes live. It's a free tool for monitoring organic traffic and keywords. To verify, go to Project Settings > Custom Code > Before Body, paste the snippet Google gives you, and publish.

Google Analytics works similarly: go to Admin > Tracking > Tag installation and paste that code on a new line. Voila.

Proper internal linking is one of the most important SEO practices: make sure there's a route to every page through links. Orphan pages have no incoming internal links, which means your stronger pages can't pass them any value. Give every page on your site a link from another page.

If you plan to blog and want people sharing your content, edit your OpenGraph thumbnails so links look right when shared.

Nailing these checks gets your site out of the gates clean. If your pages are well-crafted and technically sound, and your launch goes without a hitch, you may be well on your way to warm sands.

Thanks for making it to the end. Share this with a friend, or with the intern who's desperately trying to understand Webflow for you.