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

Getting a website to work properly is all fun and games until it's actually live on the web. It's easy to rush certain areas when you're on a tight deadline, or you just can't stop your finger from clicking publish.

Check off 2 through 5 to make sure you're at least ready to impress your grandma:

As much as I hate to admit it, live websites often look slightly different on the web than they do in the Webflow Designer. You've triple-checked flexbox alignments, dialed in pixel-perfect margins, and mastered font heights, and it can still come out looking rough.

Webflow has been called a beast, and the most minuscule style or behavioral effect can leave your site looking out of whack. I've seen it bug out completely on several occasions after looking perfect in preview mode. Be tireless when it comes to testing and you'll find 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 client questions like "Why is a picture of your grandma and her bulldog on my website? And did you mean to put 'Fortnite infinite V Bucks glitch' on my homepage?"

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

This is a near-universal user interaction, and it improves UX through plain convenience. Your logo should be clickable.

Does the hamburger menu interaction work properly when tapped?

A disclaimer: 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 website, you or your client will want a custom domain. It signals officiality and security to your audience.

Having yourbusinessname.com feels special, and it costs money. GoDaddy sells custom .coms for $12 a year. Ever wonder what those edgy Danica Patrick commercials in the 2010s were about? Custom domains.

Shorter, more common words and phrases can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars in URL form. So be unique with your name. 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 some product idea you and your drunk uncle came up with last Friday.

Think long and hard about what you want your domain to be. It matters for reasons few people realize:

Don't get nickel and dimed while buying your domain. You need the domain name and access to the Domain Naming Service. In my experience, the extra "security features" are unnecessary, unless you're running some top secret cybersecurity start-up.

Most websites need a server host to stay accessible 24/7. Ask someone smarter than me (easy to find) if you need the deep details.

I use Webflow to host my own site. They offer free hosting for beginners and small two-page projects, which is great when you're starting out: you can publish as many webflow.io practice sites as you like without spending a dime.

The catch with free hosting is that your site lives on a .webflow.io domain instead of a .com.

No client wants a webflow.io domain. Get used to explaining that hosting a custom domain on Webflow costs at least $14 a month (about $179 a year), and that paying yearly is roughly 12% cheaper. While you're at it, walk them through choosing a domain name.

DNS (Domain Naming Service) records are silly little records that come with hosting a custom domain, and you need to configure them to use one in Webflow.

Every domain registrar has a "Manage DNS" or "Manage Records" tab somewhere; find it. GoDaddy is the most straightforward provider for accessing and changing DNS records, if you can navigate the nickel and diming. Square is fine too. WHOIS feels a bit outdated.

Configuring DNS might look like Spanish the first few times. DNS sometimes looks foreign to me, and I've been speaking Spanish for 8 years. The safest route is to follow Webflow's video for GoDaddy domains step by step and do exactly what they say.

Every Webflow site should automatically get an SSL certificate once DNS is configured properly. Going live can take several days, sometimes up to a week with certain providers.

Quick checkpoint. So far we've tested the site on a staging domain and run PageSpeed Insights, chosen a user-friendly and easy-to-read domain name, and bought a hosting plan and linked a custom domain by configuring DNS properly.

This step is big, and it gets tucked away in the whirlwind of publishing a project.

Before publishing any website for yourself or a client, head to Webflow Project Settings > Forms and confirm every form is linked and delivering to the right email. If you don't have an email you regularly check for Webflow submissions, you may not catch this error for a regrettably long time.

Name your form fields intuitively so your client can see exactly what category of information they're receiving. Fields can behave strangely if they aren't set to the right information type.

While we're on forms: consider whether your site is optimized for conversion. That means guiding the user gently down the funnel, right to the call to action. Place CTAs and forms at the end of your site, or right after the section you think is most convincing.

These are non-negotiable if you want your pages to have a prayer of getting clicked in search results. A title tag is the title of your page, and it appears in Google search.

Title tags are commonly optimized for click-through rate (clicks divided by impressions). If yours is weak or generic, you'll see a lower percentage of clicks per impression and miss out on leads. Craft a nifty one under about 70 characters that highlights a unique aspect of your business.

The meta description accompanies your title tag in your Google search result. Google sometimes auto-fills it based on 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 a "...".

URL slugs are like the slimy, forgettable organisms you put on the end of a fishing line. They come after your top-level domain, like organicallyseo.com/webflow-maintenance. SEO data suggests that simple slugs containing the page's target keyword send positive signals to search engines.

There's a lot of noise surrounding H1 tags and SEO headings. Through all the jargon, the takeaway is that the H1 is the jugular when it comes to telling Google what your page is about, so Google can show it to other people.

If title tags are your communication with users, headings are your beacons to search engines. Some people claim your H1 should match your title tag exactly. I find that unrealistic, since they serve different purposes.

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

Second checkpoint. By now we've also linked form submissions to the site's admin and crafted title tags, H1s, meta descriptions, and URL slugs on every page that could show up in search results.

Consider all audiences when creating a website. Proper contrast and color hues are essential to including people with visual impairments and astigmatism.

Coolors.co has a contrast checker and a blindness simulator to make sure your content is legible to everyone. You can find your complementary colors there as well.

Every website should have a sitemap and a robots.txt. Webflow has a checkbox that generates the sitemap for you: navigate to Project Settings > SEO tab, find the checkbox, and check it. You may have to set up the robots file manually.

Set up Google 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 the same way. 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. It means every page you'd want a user to see is reachable through links from other pages.

Orphan pages are pages with zero incoming internal links. They're bad practice for SEO because your stronger pages can't pass any value to an orphan without a link. Make sure every page on your site has at least one link from another page on your site.

If you're interested in blogging and getting others to share your content, edit your OpenGraph thumbnails so your links look right when shared.

Going the extra mile on these checks is a great way to get your site out of the gates. If your pages are well-crafted, 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.