Website Launch Checklist / Ecommerce Application Launch Checklist

Prelaunch website testing before going live

Testing the interfaces and content

These items are for testing overall (top-level) site operation

Interface and Mobile friendly Testing

• Check the overall look and feel of home page, a secondary page (example: about us, contact us), product listing and detail page, a blog page and on latest devices and resolution

Other Tests and fixes

• Check for 404 pages and fix missing pages
• Check the 301 for all of the sites
• Check for broken images and fix missing pages

SEO / SEM

• Check the URL friendly for secondary pages
• Check the URL friendly for product pages
• Check on Title, Meta Descriptions, Meta Keywords, H1 tags
• Image Alt Tags
• Check the site's HTML and mobile friendly using Google Webmaster Tools
• Fix mobile friendly issues reported by Google Webmaster Tool
• Install Google Analytics

Other items:

• Favicon.ico

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End Prelaunch QA

Launch Items:

Server Items

DNS Servers

• Setup and test the configuration
• Response Time
• Delegation
• Security
• Failover

Network connection to the site

• Traceroute to site and check Network performance from different ISPs

Web Server's configurations

• Webserver configuration
• PHP Configuration

Merchant Account / Payment Gateway

• Check the payment gateway settings to make sure that it is set up to use the correct payment gateway API login
• Make sure that all settings (both at the website configuration and payment gateway configuration) are not at the test mode
• Make sure that all settings (both at the website configuration and payment gateway configuration) are set correctly (Authorize or Authorize Capture whichever is required for your project)

Security

• Run PCI Compliance / Security test on the web application (test provided by a third party security company such as Trustwave)
• Run Security test on WordPress application (test provided by a third party security company such as Trustwave)
• Run PCI Compliance / Security test on the server (test provided by a third party security company such as Trustwave)

Performance

• Test the server's performance
• Test the application's performance
• Merge and cleanup any JavaScript and CSS files for speed

SSL

• CSR generation, installation and testing
• Add Trust Seal
• Test SSL Validation and Security
• Install and check the Trust Seal

Firewall, Security Software, Security Monitoring and Audit

• Server-side firewall (IPTables or FirewallD)
• Server-side security Software (such as SELinux)
• Server-side security monitoring and audit (such as SELinux)

Database backup

• Configure and check database backup and restoration

Licenses

• Make sure all third party modules licenses are valid / paid

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Launch QA

Testing Top Level Site Operations

These items are for testing overall (top-level) site operation

Test the following top level Operation

For an Ecommerce site:

• Product search
• Product listing and detail page
• Add to Cart
• Check Out page

For a blog site:

• Account Registration
• Post a blog
• Tests comments and make sure that the comments and blogs are off or it must be approved by the admin.

For an Ecommerce site Place a test order and make sure that checkout works

• Login as Admin and create a test product for 50¢
• Search and find that item
• Add the item to the cart
• Add additional item to the cart and remove it
• Calculate shipping for different delivery service and double check the shipping charges
• Calculate taxes for diffrent state or county
• Coupon submission
• Check out as a new customer and use a live Visa credit card to make sure it goes through fine
• Double check your bank account for the credit card used to make sure that the there is a pending charge
• Later make sure that the money is deposited to your account
• Login and view orders
• Double check the email notifications
• Login as admin and ship the item and check the email notification when the product is shipped.
• Repeat the above process and check out as a guest
• Use a live AMEX credit card to make sure that there is no issues with AMEX processing (AMEX issue sometimes happens if you have a different merchant account for AMEX and the payment gateway is not setup correctly to connect to AMEX merchant services)
• Login to the ERP system and make sure that the orders have integrated correctly to the ERP system.

Test the additional top-level features

• Account Registration
• Contact Us email and notifications

SEO / SEM

• Set up base URLs (with or without www)
• Check the URL friendly for secondary pages
• Check the URL friendly for product pages
• Check on Title, Meta Descriptions, Meta Keywords, H1 tags
• Check the Image Alt Tags
• Check the site's HTML and mobile friendly using Google Webmaster Account
• Install Google Analytics

Other items:

• Test the Favicon.ico

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Magento Configuration

If you are launching Magento Ecommerce:

Magento Configuration

• Change the Admin URL for security reasons
• Make sure admin is connected through SSL
• Check the admin login security and update passwords to much stronger passwords
• Remove any unnessasry admin accounts
• Check the admin for managing a product
• Check the orders agaist ERP
• Check the base URLs
• Update noindex to index and upload robots.txt
• Make sure that contact information is correct
• Check the placeholder Images
• Make sure that all email notifications are correct
• Update invoice and packing slip interface and content
• Update error page interface and content
• Make sure the tax settings are correct
• Make sure the shipping is configured correctly
• Reindex
• Enable Caching
• Google base configuration
• Amazon checkout configuration
• Google Sitemap
• Newsletter Subscriptions
• Clean logs