How To Easily Launch A HubSpot Site Without Setting It On Fire

To launch a HubSpot site can be a daunting task. From making sure the site matches the original design to ensuring the website pages are all created and 301 redirections are in place, there's a lot of moving pieces.

Thankfully, any web designer worth their weight has predetermined checklists at hand to double-check everything. While rarely does a launch go perfectly without a few back-and-forth emails, having that checklist can save you from having to revert to the old site, or start losing SEO and visitors.

So, what's in these checklists? What are the things you need to look for and pay attention to?

In general, a pre-launch meeting between you and your designer should cover these areas:

• who owns which task for the launch
• what access needs to be shared, like domain settings, HubSpot logins, etc
• when is the launch going to be scheduled for, and who is going to be on standby to handle any issues
• how the current site is setup, and what would be a reason for reverting the site to the previous version

Here's my personal list of tasks for launching a site on the HubSpot COS:

• favicon created and uploaded
• site is tested in Chrome, Safari, IE 9+, Firefox and on iPad, iPhone and Android device for compatibility and any broken links (this is a separate task list for QA)
• 301 redirects are in place for any removed pages, or ones with changed URLs
• update error pages and subscription pages to use new templates
• update blog pages to use new templates
• one-click publish new pages from staging
• double-check pages/click around to check for anything amiss, fix little things that always come up as needed

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Every project is different so this list definitely changes depending on my clients' needs, but overall is standard practice for launching a HubSpot site. Once the QA phase is done, it's about getting into HubSpot and using their staging tool to handle all the page publishing. More than that, it's about having a process in place and making sure client and designer are on the same page.