Jul/092
Following on from Donogh‘s post on implementation best practices, here I explain in more depth some of the advantages behind an early go live.
Reasons for delays to a webstore go live can range from small issues with regards to customizations to the look and feel, to inadequate product data. While we emphasize that customers should have an aesthetically appealing site and should optimize the content, small issues that do not effect the functionality, or the look and feel on the whole, should not stop a site from going live.
The following reasons outline why it is better to go live as promptly as possible:
Search Engine Indexing: search engines robots index web sites in phases — in the first phase, only top-level pages are indexed. In the second phase, department pages are indexed, followed by category pages in next phase, etc. These phases can be as much as 4 weeks apart, meaning it can take anywhere from 3-6 months to get your webstore fully indexed. The sooner you go live, the sooner the indexing starts.
Return On Investment: getting a return on your investment is what it all boils down to. If your site remains in staging you will still be paying your monthly fees, but you will not be able to receive web orders. If you set the store live, you can continue to improve your product data and also accelerate the return on your investment through web orders.
Frequently Updated Site: it’s better to go live now with 100 items with high quality data than with 500 items in 3 months’ time. You can continue to add items to the webstore after go live. This plays to your advantage because search engines favor frequently-updated content, which means their spiders will return more frequently and your webstore will rank higher, sooner.
Obviously, we are not suggesting you set your store live right away, but once the store is at a point where it is ready, i.e., it has a payment gateway, shipping and tax configuration, high quality item data, and the look and feel match the company branding, etc., then why not set it live and starting reaping the rewards!