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After all the hard work, finally, you are now launching your Shopify store, and you’ve worked your tail off to make sure everything goes smoothly when your store goes live. You’ve prepared for this day but a lot of thoughts and worries start rushing through your mind, and you are now doubting if you’ve really completed everything necessary for a smooth store launching.
Does your store look professional? Are all the pages set up correctly? Can users view your website seamlessly on mobile devices? What about the product pages? Are they all set up correctly?
Instead of running around your store aimlessly, you can follow a Shopify launch checklist that will help you methodically review your store before you hit publish.
✓ Check website functionality.
Test your device on multiple devices. Does it work on both wide and narrow screen devices? How does your site look on a mobile device? You need to make sure that the design of your Shopify store is mobile friendly and can be viewed seamlessly on any type of device.
You must also check cross-browser compatibility. This means testing if your Shopify website works well on other browsers other than Google. Open it using different browsers like Safari, Opera, and Firefox. All buttons, pages, and texts must be working and showing correctly on these browsers too.
Additionally, don’t forget to check all links to ensure there are no missing links. And, of course, check if header and footer links are working correctly.
✓ Review all Shopify settings.
The next thing you need to do is go over all your store’s settings. These include the business, payment, shipping, and tax settings.
Business settings
- Make sure your customer service email and website admin email are correct
- Make sure your store’s name, address, phone number are correct across all pages.
Payment settings
- Make sure the payment gateway is set up correctly.
- You need to test the payment gateway, too, and ensure it’s working.
- If you’re going to let customers use PayPal, make sure this is set up too.
Shipping settings
- Check if the shipping rates that are applicable to your store are correctly set up.
- Test if all shipping rates you’ve set up are working, too.
- If you’re running Google Shopping campaigns, make sure that your shipping settings are properly set up in Google Merchant Center as well, and make sure it matches what’s actually on your Shopify checkout.
Tax Settings
- Ensure all of your physical locations are accounted for within tax settings.
✓ Check product pages
Now this one is a step you should NEVER miss. Go through all your product pages with a fine-tooth comb and make sure each page is set up correctly.
- Did you use the right images on each product page?
- Are the titles and descriptions correct? Are they written clearly?
- How about the product variants? If there are any, have they been added, too?
- Are you doing tracking inventory in Shopify? Make sure that the inventory amounts are correct for each product, too.
✓ Check all legal pages.
I recommend that you make sure that you’ve added all the “legal pages” to your store as well and that they are compliant to Google’s rules.
These are the pages that include your :
- Returns and refunds page
- Shipping and delivery page
- Terms and conditions page
- Privacy Policy page
All of these pages are very important so you need to make sure you’ve added them and that they match the actual policies and the way you do things for your store. It’s also a best practice to add these pages to your footer so your customers can easily see and access them when they need to check these pages.
You need these pages to drive paid traffic to your store, and also to avoid getting your Google Merchant Center account suspended. If you haven’t created these pages yet, you can watch this video tutorial, where I show you how to create Google-compliant pages on your Shopify store.
✓ Review all installed apps.
The next item in this Ultimate Shopify launch checklist is your Shopify apps. Before launching your store, go through all your installed apps and make sure they’re all set up properly with the right settings. Remove any apps that you’re not actually using in case they could slow down your store with too much code that you don’t need.
✓ Check if a favicon has been added.
A favicon is a small icon that appears at the top of your browser in the bookmarks section. You can add a favicon that is specific to your Shopify store to improve your branding and help users when they’re navigating your website.
Make sure you use a 16×16 pixel image of your logo and you can set this up within your theme editor in the settings.
✓ Review and test your checkout.
You can do this by putting through a fake order. Shopify has a feature where you can place a test order but this also means putting your store on hold. So instead, you can easily create a 100% off discount and place an order on your Shopify store. Make sure your checkout works and that everything looks the way you want it.
✓ Test the contact page.
The contact us page is one of the most visited pages in your site. Customers go there to ask you something about your products, or contact you for returns and refunds concerns. Therefore, it’s crucial to test out this page and make sure that when a customer submits the form that you actually get the email to your email address telling you someone has contacted you.
✓ Remove your store password.
Before launching, make sure that you have actually removed your store’s password. Otherwise, customers and web visitors will not be able to access your store.
Time to Launch!
Now that you’ve reviewed your store, checked all settings, added the legal pages, tested forms and checkout, and checked all the items in this ULTIMATE Shopify launch checklist, you are now ready to publish your store.
You’re one step closer to building your Ecommerce empire, getting thousands of sales and, of course, giving value to your customers. It’s the beginning of an exciting journey for you and your Ecommerce store. There will still be plenty of things to improve and change as you scale your store but this Shopify pre launch checklist will get you off to a great start!
