The First 90 Days After Your Website Launches

A new website is not a finished thing. It is a hypothesis about what your customers want, published. The businesses that get a return from it are almost never the ones with the biggest build budget. They are the ones that treated the twelve weeks after launch as part of the work.

In week one, watch it behave. Send yourself an enquiry from a phone on mobile data, not from the office wifi, and confirm the message actually arrives in the inbox somebody reads. Click every link and fix the ones that go nowhere. Look at it on the cheapest Android handset in the building. Confirm that search engines can see the site and that the version that went live is not still blocking them, which is the single most common launch mistake there is.

In week two, tell people. This sounds obvious and it is skipped constantly. Most new websites launch in silence and then get judged on traffic that nobody was ever sent. Message your WhatsApp contacts and broadcast lists. Put the address in your email signature and every social bio. Add it to your Google Business Profile. Print it on the invoice, the receipt, the vehicle and the shopfront. A website nobody has been told about is a shop with the lights off.

In week three, fix the five things you already know are wrong. Every launch has a list: the paragraph that never sounded right, the photo you meant to replace, the service you decided to explain later. That list does not improve with age. Clear it while the site is fresh in your head.

From week four onward, add the questions. Every question a customer asks you in the first month is a page your website is missing. Keep a note beside the phone. When the same question comes up twice, it becomes a page or a paragraph that week. Twelve weeks of that discipline builds a site that answers more than the version you launched, written entirely from evidence rather than guesswork.

Keep adding proof as it arrives. A finished project, a photograph from a site visit, a line from a happy client, a certificate. Once a month is enough. A site that has visibly changed in the last quarter tells a visitor you are busy and trading. A site frozen since launch tells them the opposite, and eventually it makes them check whether you are still in business at all.

Check the numbers at day thirty, sixty and ninety. Not daily, and not never. Enquiries, conversion, the pages people arrive on, the page they leave from. Three data points across ninety days is enough to see direction, and direction is what you need before spending anything on advertising.

Keep it safe while you are at it. Software updates applied, backups running and tested at least once, someone watching for downtime. A site is most likely to be neglected in exactly this period, when it feels new and fine, and neglect is what makes the eventual failure expensive.

At ninety days, sit down and review it properly with the numbers in front of you. What worked, what is silent, what a customer told you that the site still does not say. Decide the next three things. That review is the difference between a website that compounds and one that slowly becomes a brochure of how your business looked one year ago.

The build gets the attention and the invoice. The ninety days after it get the results.