Going Live

It is easy to overlook something in the process of migrating a site and making that site available to the public. The following is a collection of common tasks which should be performed before, during, and shortly after a site goes live.

Before Scheduling a Go-Live Date

Although five business days may seem like a long time to wait for a site to go live, it may not be enough time to address some issues. For this reason, it is best to take a few extra steps before committing to that date.

  • Prepare, configure, and test Redirects in Omni CMS.
  • Submit an Omni CMS Support Request to enable Insights on the site. Once the Insights reports are available (usually the day after it is enabled), review the reports and determine which issues should be addressed.
  • Configure a scan in Siteimprove to check the accessibility of the dev site and fix any issues. (Note that there may be issues discovered by Siteimprove which are not discovered by Insights, and vice versa.)
  • If the site is not configured for HTTPS-only, check the content using HTTPS to make sure everything is loading properly.
  • Review content and menus to make sure everything has been migrated and links are working properly.

Schedule the Go-Live Date

Go-live date(s) must be requested at least 5 business days prior to launch date to allow time to coordinate DNS changes.

This may be a good time to perform an additional content review and verify that accessibility fixes have been performed properly. When the site is ready, please submit a request to go live.

On the Go-Live Date

  • Update and re-publish robots.txt.
  • (Optional) Add analytics script to /_resources/includes/analytics.inc and publish the file.
  • Once the site is visible on the production domain, check the content and links on the site to make sure everything is loading properly.

After the Go-Live Date (24-48 Hours)

DNS changes may take some time to propagate across networks and around the world (in some cases as long as 48+ hours). For this reason, it is recommended that the following steps are taken a day or two after the site goes live.

  • Configure Redirects on the site's old host/CMS.
  • Notify the SDSU Web Community if any of your URLs have changed so they can update links on their sites.