Menu
When you go live
Built out your website and ready to take it live? Look over this checklist to make sure everything is ready to go.
- Add favicon
- Add website/page social images
- Add website/page descriptions
- Set site language
- Add tracking
- Set password protect
- Check for responsiveness in app, on different sized devices, or on Chrome’s device toolbar
- No more placeholder images/text left on site
- All links are linked and working properly
- Any buggy behavior on the live site has been resolved
- Set up any necessary redirects
- Purchase/know what custom domain you're going to use
- Do a final runthrough of all content to make sure it's good to go live
SEO considerations
If your site is going to be a public site that you want to rank on search results, these are some steps you can take to make sure you’ve optimized the SEO of your site.
Fill out your page and website settings
You can access website settings by opening your website and going to Studio > Website Settings or Page Settings. Here you can change the following:
- Website / page name
- Custom domain
- Website / page description
- Page slug (end part of the url)
- Favicon
- Social image
- Allow search engines to index/follow
- Site / page language
- Google Tag Manager
- Canonical URL
Redirects
To avoid any dead links, you can add redirects to your site. To add a redirect to your website in TIME Sites, open your website and go to Studio > Redirect Manager.
Click on Add New. In the first field, redirect from, type in the address of the page you want people to not land on or select it from the drop down menu. Don’t add in the beginning part of your url, just everything that comes after the .com or whatever top-level domain you’re using. Also, this field can only be used for pages on your site, not on external sites.
Next, enter in the url of where you want the first one to redirect to. This can either be an internal or external link. If it’s an external link, make sure to include the full url.
Finally, select the redirect type. A 301 redirect means that the page has permanently moved to a new location. A 302 redirect means that the move is only temporary. Search engines need to figure out whether to keep the old page, or replace it with the one found at the new location.
Press Add Redirect and publish your site for the redirect to take effect. You can always go back into the redirect manager to edit and delete existing redirects.
Verify your website with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tool
The first step to getting your site on Google and other search engines is to be sure that they can find it. The best way to do that is to submit a sitemap. A sitemap is a file on your site that tells search engines about new or changed pages on your site. Learn how to create and submit a sitemap for your TIME Sites site.
Hosting
Your hosting is also important. A slow site makes for unhappy users, and page load speed impacts search ranking results.
TIME Sites uses Cloudfront, which is the world’s leading CDN that uses a global network of 216 Points of Presence (205 Edge Locations and 11 Regional Edge Caches) in 84 cities across 42 countries. This enables delivering content to end users with lower latency—i.e., lightning-fast websites. Added benefits include: Auto-renewing SSL certificates (for guaranteed website encryption), Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection, and high security and availability.
Your domain
Your domain is yet another important part of your website. Your URL is the first thing visitors to your site will see, and a good domain name can make a positive impression, provided legitimacy, and make it easy to memorize. Your domain also affects SEO and defines your brand.
Important factors on deciding your domain name
- Is your site going to have brand new domain (mynewsite.com), or a subdomain on an existing domain (reports.mysite.com)
- What domain extension(s) do you want—.com, .org, .ca, etc.
- Make it brandable and memorable, not generic
- Keep it short
- Make it easy to type
- Make it easy to pronounce
- Avoid hyphens and numbers
Where should you register your domain?
There are countless of companies where you can purchase your domain from. For your TIME Sites websites, we strongly recommend you use a modern DNS like Google Domains, AWS, EasyDNS, or Cloudflare for your domains to take full advantage of our platform. If you choose to use a legacy app like GoDaddy or Network Solutions, some variations of your domain will not work.
TIME Sites no longer provides IP addresses for A records as we are hosting on an industry-leading serverless platform. We now use Cloudfront, which is the world’s leading CDN that uses a global network of 216 Points of Presence (205 Edge Locations and 11 Regional Edge Caches) in 84 cities across 42 countries. This enables delivering content to end users with lower latency—i.e., lightning-fast websites. Added benefits include: Auto-renewing SSL certificates (for guaranteed website encryption), Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection, and high security and availability.
It’s important that whatever DNS you choose has the ability to either place a non-IP address as an A record, ability to add an ANAME or Alias record, provide CNAME flattening, or can support secure domain forwarding.
Connecting your domain to your TIME Sites website
Every site you create on TIME Sites can immediately be published to a TIME Sites subdomain. But if you want your site to appear at a custom domain or subdomain (for example, mywebsite.com) there are a few additional steps you'll have to take:
- Register the custom domain, if you don't already own it
- Enter your Custom Domain Name in Website Settings in Design Studio.
- Reach out to your TIME Sites support team member to let them know you want to add a custom domain. You will be asked to add an entry to your DNS settings to validate ownership of your domain and create your auto-renewing SSL certificate.
- Once you have completed this step (you have 72 hours to do so), let your TIME Sites contact know. They will provide you a Cloudfront URL, to which you will configure your domains DNS A record, ANAME, Alias, or CNAME, depending on your DNS' capability. You may or may not also need to set up domain forwarding.