If you’re looking to set up a WordPress website, you know there are quite a few steps that you need to perform. If you’ve got a number of projects going on simultaneously, you might easily get overwhelmed with the number of things that you’ll need to think about in order to have all bases covered. That’s why we’ve written the Ultimate (111 items!) WordPress Checklist for setting up and launching a website.

TL;DR
Are you in a hurry? Get this by email and file it away for your next website launch!

You can download the website launch checklist in Word (.docx) or Excel (.xlsx) format below:

If you’ve seen our other checklists, such as our awesome 128 task website checklist, you’ll know we like doing a great job of these.

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So with this WordPress checklist, you’ll know you got all of your tasks sorted out. Well done – you’re on the right track!

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Check out Wrike now.

WordPress CheckList: Hosting + installation

We’ll start our WordPress checklist with the bare essentials. Preparing the hosting space and infrastructure for your site.

1. Buy or get the details of the domain you will be using to host the site. You should at the very least have access to change the name servers of the domain. You’ll need these details when you come to launch the site.
2. Make sure the hosting company you will be using meets the minimum hosting requirements.
3. Buy or get the hosting details where the site will be hosted – you should have details to access a CPanel for hosting the site.
4. Find the details to open a support call – you might need it when configuring the site.
5. Create and set up all the details for a new domain in your hosting cPanel. Take note of all passwords created during the setup. DO NOT reuse passwords from other sites. Take note of the following details
   • FTP or Subdomain username
   • Domain password
6. Create and set up a new database in cPanel. Do NOT reuse existing databases for new WP installations
7. Create a new database user in CPanel. Take note of these details. DO NOT reuse database users and DO NOT reuse passwords.
   • Database name
   • Database user
   • Database password
   • Database server address

8. Grant access to the newly created user to the newly created database. You should use a different user for each installation that you have.
9. Set up a new email address on the domain for use with the WP installation. Take note of the password of the email address and the mail server location. You’ll need them if you want to set up email sending and receiving through Gmail or otherwise.
10. Record new domain and database information into tracking software
11. Upload the core files to the File Manager. Keep the files compressed (it will take less time to upload). You can then uncompress them via File Manager.
12. If you want your WP to install in the root folder, upload it to the domain folder you have created. If you plan to have something else at the root domain, and you need to have the install in a sub-folder (e.g. www.domain.com/blog), create the subfolder e.g. blog, and upload to it directly
13. Run the WP installation procedure. You’ll be able to access your install by running it on the temporary URL provided by your hosting.
14. Make sure you do not use ‘admin’ as the username for the administrator account as this is a security risk – because it is easy to guess. Use something which is easy to remember but hard to guess. If your site is a blog about food, name it foodieadmin or something along those lines.
15. Make sure the admin account has a strong password which you store in something like LastPass ONLY! Make sure you don’t reuse the password in other places. This would render that password unsafe to use.
16. Log in to the WP administration screen using your admin credentials. The Login URL is https://<your temporary URL>/wp-login.php
17. Go to Settings > General settings and make sure that the WordPress Address and site address are the way you would like them to be. You might want to add www, or https if your site is going to be hosted on a secure server
18. Confirm that the rest of the settings such as Timezone, Membership, and other settings are as you would like them to be (Settings > General)
19. Setup or confirm your site name and site tagline. These are quite important for SEO purposes to choose wisely (Settings > General).
20. Setup Ping services to increase traffic to your site each time you publish a new post. If you have an Update service you want to use, set it up in the Writing settings (Settings > Writing). There is a list of common Update Services on the codex.
21. Set the Media or Uploads path. By default, all images are uploaded into year and month folders. If this makes it difficult for you to find image files, you can untick the checkbox in (Settings > Media)
22. Delete the sample content. By default, there is a default post and default comment. You may want to delete these.

WordPress Security Checklist

Next on our WordPress checklist is securing your WP website. After all of the long hard work you’ve put into designing a site and creating all of the content necessary to support it, you’ll need to make sure the site has been fully secured. These steps in our checklist ensure that your site has been secured.

23. Enable WP autoupdates.
24. Update the unique authentication keys and salts of your installation. These keys make it more difficult to guess the passwords of your website. Generate a set of secret keys here: https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/ and then update your wp-config file with the secrets keys that were generated for you.
25. Secure the wp-config.php. If your shared hosting server supports .htaccess files, you may deny access to wp.config through the following commands at the top of the file

26. <files wp-config.php>
    order allow,deny
    deny from all
    </files>

27. Remove the WP version. You can either use a plugin or a simpler way to do this is to insert a small function into the functions.php file

    1. function remove_version() {
       return '';
       }
       add_filter('the_generator', 'remove_version');

28. Limit brute force login attempts. Some scripts will hammer your Administrative backend with repeated attempts to log in with common passwords to try to get access to the backend. Prevent this by installing the Login LockDown plugin. This will disable the ability to login after a few failed attempts to log in.
29. Check and enable comments settings (if you would like commenting to be enabled)
30. If you have enabled commenting, you’ll need to protect from comment spam – Akismet is the easiest way to do this
31. Enable a backup plan – if the brown stuff hits the fan, you want to make sure you’ve got a fallback plan
32. Install a firewall to help protect from malicious bots, scripts, and attacks. There are various options in this regard
    1. iThemes security is a great all in one security plugin which we have reviewed here.
    2. WordFence is another option for securing your site
    3. Another option is to enable a WAP (web application firewall) such as ModSecurity which is open source. Ask your hosting server, this might already be enabled on shared hosting servers

WordPress Configuration Checklist

The configuration of your site’s structure is one of the most important parts you need to do to complete the WordPress checklist. Of course, this is mostly up to the needs of the website and there is little guidance that we can give you there.

33. Plan your website’s hierarchy – if you want to give your users a positive user experience, whilst also boosting the SEO of your site, you should start with a logical hierarchy for your site. The ideal way to create a hierarchy in WP is, of course, using categories. Create categories of posts which you plan to have. Your categories should help define what your website is about. You can think of it like “Chapters” in your website’s story. This is extremely important for ranking in search engines  (see later)
34. Add a contact page or Contact Us form – what’s the purpose of a website if your customers can’t easily get in touch with you? Your contact form should have the following as a minimum
    1. Be easily accessible from most pages (link in header or footer)
    2. Relay enough information from the customer to be able to answer their query
    3. It should not ask for any non-essential information
    4. Instill a sense of trust in the company ideally by showing the team and having some personality in the contact page
    5. Show any additional contact options such as phone, address, and social media
35. Add other essential, ancillary pages
    • About Us – a detailed overview of the company. This should contain enough information for somebody to become familiar with the company and what it is all about
    • Create a Privacy Policy page – A privacy policy is legally required. It is absolutely necessary to state if collect any kind of information about your users (even as simple as website analytics) – it explains what you will do and not do with that information.
    • Create a Terms and Conditions page – this will limit your liability, set the copyright of the website, set the governing law for the website, and reference the privacy policy you will be governed by
36. Add your sales, product, or service pages. The pages can be either an integral part of the theme you chose (see next section), or you can consider a plugin which allows you to create sales-focused landing pages
37. Generate an XML Sitemap for the site
38. Submit the default RSS feed to Feedburner to know who is subscribing to your site through RSS. Of course, make sure you display the RSS icon with the correct link.
39. Create a custom 404 page for those times when your user can’t find what they need. Make sure you include a call to action such as Contact Us to find what you’re looking for

WordPress Theme Configuration Checklist

Before we start, you might want to have a look at this list of excellent Divi examples, (35 websites) – which show you what a stunning result you can achieve once you follow this list of items that you need to do.

40. Choose, install, and configure a theme. This, of course, is not as simple as it sounds. You’ll need to find something which is suitable for your industry. Choose a theme that is fully responsive.
41. Create a child theme before doing any CSS changes. This makes sure that when you update your theme, you don’t lose any customization you’ve done
42. Update the theme with your logo or the logo of the customer
43. Configure the menus necessary for this site
44. Configure any widgets necessary
45. Test whether your theme looks good with the most comment content using the standard test content (http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Unit_Test)
46. Test for responsiveness and mobile support (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/)
47. Link the logo of your company to the homepage
48. Set a favicon for your site. As a minimum, you can create a Favicon using Dynamic Drive favicon generator and upload it to the root folder of your site as favicon.ico

 

WordPress Search Engine Optimization Checklist

Search Engine Optimization for a site is an ongoing thing. It starts from WordPress onpage SEO and ends with link building – getting people to actually link to your site and content. However, there are some WordPress checklist essentials which you need to make sure you are doing. If you want to learn even more about SEO you can get your WordPress site SEO ready with these tips.

If your site is image-focused, then are specific steps you can take to optimize images for SEO, as you can see from this checklist: WordPress Image SEO Checklist: 9 Pro Tips to Optimize Images for Search Engines.

49. Make sure you are not discouraging search engines from indexing your site (Settings > Reading > Search Engine Visibility). Make sure it’s turned OFF
50. Enable search engine friendly permalinks – (Settings > Permalinks > Post name) is ideal because it includes the keywords you use in your post titles as part of the URL of the post
51. Install an SEO plugin. Recommended plugin choices for doing a lot of SEO-related functions are Yoast and SEO Ultimate.
52. Generate an XML sitemap
53. Login to Google Search Console and verify your website
54. Login to Bing WebMaster tools and verify the website
55. Check for any errors and messages Google is highlighting and make sure you fix them
56. Submit the XML sitemap to the Google Search console
57. Submit the XML sitemap to Bing WebMaster tools
58. Use correct headings within your content – organize titles and headings according to the structure of your posts and the keywords you want to target for SEO
59. All pages and posts should have unique titles with 70 characters or less
60. All pages and posts should have unique meta descriptions with 156 characters or less
61. Use two-fold headlines to improve the number of keywords you are targeting
62. Set post titles and descriptions manually – focus on making them not only keyword-rich, but most importantly user-friendly, and ideally focused to attract users to click to your posts.
63. Make sure your WordPress site is fast
64. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly

WordPress Social Networking + Integration Checklist

A WordPress Checklist for setting up a website cannot be complete if it does not include supplementary services such as social networking sites and other tools which need to be integrated. Here are the things you want to consider.

65. First and foremost – you should implement a Social Sharing plugin. Sumo is great because it enables non-intrusive, light share buttons that do not require a plugin. You only need to add a simple script to your theme.

Twitter Integration

66. Implement Twitter Cards for your website – this allows your posts to look better when they are shared on Twitter. Specific SEO plugins such as Yoast SEO and SEO Ultimate implement Twitter Cards
67. Customize your Twitter Social profile to the look, feel, and branding of your website. Twitter Recommends a Profile Header size is 1500px by 500px, whilst the profile picture should be 400px by 400px
68. If you’d like to push posts to Twitter automatically – you might consider installing WP to Twitter

Facebook Integration

69. Implement Open Graph (or OG tags) for your website – these are supported by Facebook and will show the correct title, image, and other details for your post when sharing to Facebook. Yoast and SEO Ultimate both implement Facebook open graph tags correctly – so you might want to consider implementing one of these plugins
70. Customize your Facebook page to the branding of your website. The Facebook cover photo recommended size is 851px by 315px, whilst the profile picture is 180px by 180px
71. If you would like your posts to automatically get published to your Facebook page, you might consider installing the official WP Facebook plugin. You’ll need to have created a Facebook application for your website

Mailing List Integration

One of the primary aims of your website should be to collect leads. The most efficient and effective way to keep potential leads coming back to your website is to collect email addresses. Using an email address, you can keep potential clients interested in targeted content. An essential part of developing a website should be thus – a means of collecting email addresses

72. Register with a mailing service for use with your website
73. Implement a newsletter component with a widget that suggests users subscribe to your newsletter.
74. An even more powerful way to collect email address is to create a popup with a Lead Magnet – offer something targeted to your client in exchange for their email address
75. SumoMe ListBuilder is an excellent way of picking up email addresses. Make sure you have a powerful lead magnet – something essential to your visitors. Something they can’t do without.

Analytics, Monitoring, and Uptime Integration

76. Add Google or any other Analytics to the theme
77. Add Monitor.us or Pingdom uptime monitoring service to ensure you get notified if your website experiences downtime
78. Add Hotjar to see what your visitors are up to in real-time using recordings, HeatMaps, and other visitor insights

WordPress Performance Checklist

Performance is something that you need to take a deep hard look at and should be considered a full phase by itself. We’ve got a specific post on how to Make WordPress fast in 9 simple steps. We’ve also included the essentials steps in our WordPress checklist.

79. Clean up any unused themes, plugins or anything else which you will not be using
80. Install a performance optimization plugin such as W3 Total Cache or any other performance plugin which you prefer
81. Check how quickly your website loads and try to implement suggestions to make your website faster
82. Load time of your website should be 3 seconds or less

WordPress Testing Checklist

83. You may want to run website tests using the WP testing data – and check whether the posts pass all the recommended tests.
84. Run a few pages of the site through the W3C Validators to check for valid syntax. You should check using both the HTML validator and the CSS validator.
85. Check whether you left any broken links by mistake
86. Check whether your website has any accessibility problems, and fix them
87. Your website should look great all ALL browsers, not just the one you design it with. Check how your website looks on different browsers using browsershots.org. As a minimum, you should test on the following browsers
    • Chrome
    • Internet Explorer
    • Safari
    • Firefox
    • Any other browser requested by your client
88. Your website should use a responsive theme that makes it look right on ALL sizes of devices. You should test on all of the following devices as a minimum
    • Extra Small devices (smartphones)
    • Small devices (phablets and tablets)
    • Medium devices (Laptops and small screens)
    • Large devices (Large screens)
89. Make sure you have removed any dummy text such as any Lorem Ipsum text
90. Proofread the content of the site for any spelling and grammar errors. Spelling mistakes and grammatical problems will leave a very bad impression on your visitors. Proofread multiple times, by different people.
91. Make sure all contact details are correct throughout the site
92. Check that images are formatted correctly and have been optimised for speed
93. Check that audio and video items are correct
94. Check that any assets such as PDFs are correctly linked. Text assets should also be thoroughly proofread too.
95. Any old website URLs which are still sending traffic should be 301 redirected to new versions of the pages
96. Any images, files, fonts, themes, and other content should be properly licensed. Licenses should be properly stored to ensure they are accessible in case of disputes.

Website Functionality Checklist

97. Verify that all forms are working and submitting any data correctly
98. Contact forms should be tested to check that they are sending to the correct email address
99. Test for forms displaying a correct message after submission and redirecting to the correct page if necessary
100. Check that any form or email auto-replies are working correctly. Text within the auto-replies should have been proofed with all website texts
101. Check that all sharing icons are working correctly
102. If you’ve enabled posting to social networks, verify that posting is working ok, especially the Featured images and texts on the different social networks

WordPress Checklist: Launch

103. Change DNS on domain to your hosting’s nameservers. Wait some time for the name servers to propagate – check the propagation on WhatsMyDns 
104. View site to check for any obvious problems
105. Check the site on the new domain to make sure that everything is showing correctly
106. Check links to make sure they are referencing the correct domain
107. Pat yourself on the back – your new site is up and running!

Post Launch Checklist

108. Add the website to your portfolio
109. Setup a retainer with the client for maintenance updates
110. Take a backup of the development site
111. Clean up your development server and archive the development site backup

 

Wrike – your live WordPress Checklist

All of the above tasks can be added to Wrike.

That way – you know you’ve got absolutely everything covered. You’ll also be able to monitor progress as the project gets underway. You can also choose to show progress to the client, by marking specific tasks as Public.

Why not have a look at Wrike now?

That should be quite a comprehensive WordPress checklist for you. We tried to cover the most essential stuff, we’d be happy if you could point out missing steps. We’ll gladly add them to make this checklist even more complete.

Get in touch with your suggestions below.