Launch day is the first test, not the finish line

The first month after a launch is when a new setup meets real customers, and it is usually when the small problems show up.

What tends to surface in the first month

• The first form submission lands in a spam folder or never arrives at all.
• An email to a new client bounces or ends up in their junk folder.
• You want to change a sentence on the homepage and aren't sure how.
• A new laptop or a new employee needs to be set up.
• Renewal notices arrive in an inbox that nobody checks.

A 30-day checklist

1. On day one, submit your own contact form and send test emails to a Gmail address and an Outlook address, then check that each one reaches the inbox.
2. In the first week, check the verification status of your Google Business Profile and fix anything Google has flagged.
3. In the second week, look in Google Search Console for pages that couldn't be indexed.
4. In the third week, restore one file from your backup.
5. In the fourth week, review who has access to which systems and write down where each important login is kept.

Plan for when something breaks

The first of the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security's baseline controls for small organizations is an incident response plan. For a small business, that plan can fit on a single page that lists who to call, where the important logins are kept and what to do first. Writing it during a calm week costs very little, while working it out in the middle of an outage costs a great deal more.

Make sure you own what was built

By the end of the first month, the domain, the hosting account and the email administrator account should all be in your name, along with a written record of where everything is. If someone else set things up for you, ask for that handover now.

A worked example

A new café launches its website on a Monday. By Thursday, three catering enquiries have arrived through the form, but they are sitting in a spam folder because the form sends from an address that the new mailbox doesn't yet trust. Nobody notices for a week, even though a test submission on launch day would have revealed the problem in five minutes.

Reading Google Search Console in the first month

The Pages report in Search Console shows which of your pages Google has indexed and which it hasn't. Two messages are common for new sites, and at first they usually aren't a cause for concern.

• "Discovered, currently not indexed" means that Google knows the page exists but hasn't crawled it yet.
• "Crawled, currently not indexed" means that Google has visited the page but hasn't added it to its index yet, which often happens with new, short or very similar pages.

Submit your sitemap, request indexing for your most important pages, and check again after a couple of weeks.

Keep a handover record

Whoever set things up, finish the month with a single document that lists who owns each of the following items, where its login is kept and when it renews.

• Domain registrar and DNS settings
• Website hosting and the website's admin login
• Email administrator account
• Google Business Profile, Google Analytics and Search Console
• Social media accounts
• Backup service

Write a one-page incident plan

1. List who to call first, with their phone numbers.
2. Note where the handover record is kept.
3. Explain what to do if email is compromised, starting with changing the password from a trusted device and checking for forwarding rules.
4. Explain what to do if the website goes down, starting with the host's status page and then a restore from backup.
5. Set out when to call the bank and when to report the incident to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre.

Frequently asked questions

How soon should a new website appear on Google?

A new site can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to appear. Submitting a sitemap and requesting indexing for your key pages usually speeds things up.

Why do our form emails keep landing in spam?

The most common cause is a sending address or domain that isn't properly authenticated. Check that SPF, DKIM and DMARC are set up for the domain your form sends from.

Where should renewal notices go?

Renewal notices should go to an address that more than one person checks, such as a shared admin or billing mailbox. Renewals for domains, hosting, certificates and licences often arrive only once a year, which is exactly why they get missed.

Should I keep my old email address after switching?

Keep checking or forwarding the old address for a few months while clients, suppliers and other accounts catch up. After that, close it or keep it for personal use only.

When does ongoing support make sense?

Ongoing support makes sense once small fixes start taking time away from your customers, or as soon as you hire your first employee and have devices and accounts to manage.

Key takeaways

• Test your form and your email on day one, using addresses outside your own domain.
• Check Google Search Console and your Business Profile within the first two weeks.
• Restore one file before the month is out.
• Finish the month with a handover record and a one-page incident plan.