Launching a website? Here are your top 5 priorities (and what can wait)

The time has finally come: After all that hard work, your new website is now officially live! This is a fantastic milestone, but at the same time, the real work is just beginning. Many entrepreneurs rush to tackle dozens of tasks at once after launch and end up losing track of everything. To ensure your efforts pay off right away, it’s crucial to set the right priorities.

What needs to be done right now to get things up and running, and what can wait a little longer? In this article, together with the hosting provider MijnHostingPartner .nl, we’ll walk you through the most important steps for a successful launch!

Sources of Traffic for Your Website

One of the first items on your agenda will be to attract as many visitors as possible to your website. More visitors mean more opportunities, but how do you achieve that? And what sources are available? Read on to find out:

Paid Traffic

The most direct way—and the one that delivers results the fastest—is paid advertising for your website and your business. There are many different ways to do this. However, the most commonly used method is Google Ads. There, you can advertise across all Google channels and gain access to a massive audience—provided, of course, that you have the necessary budget.

There are also opportunities to run ads on social media. Especially if you offer lifestyle or fashion products, Instagram or other visual platforms are often the top choice for advertising. Of course, you’ll want to carefully consider how you want to structure this. Do users land directly on one of your landing pages or on one of your main pages? Here, too, you can experiment to find out what works best.

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is traffic that is generated and reaches your website without you having to pay for it directly. However, this should by no means be considered “free,” as it involves a great deal of work that takes months to build—with no direct guarantee of results. Often, content is written, pages are created, and other measures are taken to generate as much traffic as possible through search engines, AI, and social media—without having to pay per click.

Organic traffic should be at the top of your priority list from day one, but unfortunately, this is a long-term project. That’s because you need brand awareness and trust to appear in search results, AI responses, and social media feeds.

So keep experimenting in this area and try to gather as many sources as possible. Blind reliance on a single source has already been the downfall of many a company. After all, the tap can be turned off at any time.

Don’t forget these tools

There are a number of tools that make life easier for you as a website owner and give you the ability to keep a close eye on everything that’s happening on your website. We recommend the following Google tools right from the start:

Google Search Console

This is your direct line of communication with the Google search engine. With this (free) tool, you can see exactly how your website is performing in organic search results. You’ll learn which search terms users are using to find you, how often your website is clicked on, and your average ranking position. It’s also the ideal place to submit your sitemap.xml and check whether Google detects any technical errors (such as indexing issues or mobile usability problems) on your pages.

Google Analytics (GA4)

While Search Console shows what happens before a visit (in the search results), Analytics shows what visitors do on your website. This gives you insights into who your visitors are, the sources through which they reach your website (e.g., ads, social media, or search engines), and which pages are the most popular. It also allows you to accurately measure how many people make a purchase or fill out a contact form (conversions). This is crucial for determining which marketing efforts are actually generating revenue for you.

Tip: Make sure to link both tools together right from the start. Even if you don’t do much with the data in the first few weeks, you’ll immediately start building up historical data. This is invaluable for future analyses!

What can be put on hold for now?

It’s easy to get lost in your to-do list once the website goes live. That’s why it’s important to be clear about your priorities—and to make sure you don’t get bogged down in tasks that aren’t an immediate priority. Here are some tasks that many people tackle right away, but that really only need to be reviewed in six months’ time.

Go through all 404 error messages

During website development and content publication, you may delete or hide pages. This results in a 404 error message (“Page Not Found”) and can cause problems.

However, it’s not yet necessary to focus on this constantly during the initial phase. Once you’ve put the main pages and content online, though, you should quickly generate a new sitemap.xml. In WordPress, this is very easy, and we recommend using “The SEO Framework” for this. This plugin does this automatically for you and ensures that only the relevant and correct pages are included.

Then, submit it to Google Search Console so that your website can be indexed correctly.

Obsessively Tracking Traffic Every Day

In the first few weeks after launch, it’s very tempting to refresh your Analytics dashboard every hour. However, this makes little sense and wastes a lot of energy. Your website still needs to build authority and gain momentum, which means that data streams will fluctuate wildly or remain minimal at first.

Let the tools do their work quietly in the background and collect data. Only after a few weeks or months will you have enough representative data to draw truly valuable conclusions and make adjustments.

Launching your website is a fantastic milestone, but it’s just the beginning of the journey. By focusing on the essentials in the initial phase—setting up tracking tools and combining fast (paid) and sustainable (organic) visitor traffic—you’ll lay a solid foundation. Set aside the minor details for now, focus on what’s driving results right now, and give your website time to grow!