This quick tutorial assumes that you’ve already have a domain name, a hosting platform, a WordPress installation on that host, built your WordPress website pages, and you’re ready for launching and testing.
Here’s the thing… if you built your website and you didn’t have a construction page set up by default (which is what Bluehost does), your site is already live.
Hey, that was easy.
If you do have a default plugin that has a construction page, navigate to that plugin and deactivate it OR go to the plugin settings and click the button to remove the home page (then deactivate that thing… it just takes up room).
One last thing before testing is to make sure that your SSL certificate is applied to your account SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a security protocol. If you look in the address bar of your website, you want it to start with “https://” and you want all “http://:” and addresses with and without either to resolve to “https://”. Really Simple SSL does a good job doing that, and it changes the file paths for your images and other internal links to reflect the same thing. Otherwise, if you have “mixed content” which is “secure” and “unsecure,” you can have performance issues or you’ll find that the little lock icon in the address bar isn’t there, shows an “I”, or says “not secure.” This is uber important to fix for SEO and it’s absolutely critical for ecommerce sites. I usually use the plugin Really Simple SSL to ensure that the website and all of its content is using the right version of the site.
Now for testing.
I recommend, if you have a caching plugin OR if your host has caching built into your site, clear all caches.
What’s a cache? Caching is a way for a website to store part of it in the client’s (your device’s) browser. This allows for elements of the page (or the contents of the whole page) to be stored and retrieved quickly when revisiting those elements.
So, whenever you make changes to a page, it’s best to clear your cache.
Now, in Divi you can operate the site while logged in and not using the Visual Builder. However, when testing, I recommend that you and several other people visit the site and bang away at everything you can click on and fill. Record anything that’s weird, and come back to the site to try to fix the issues. Luckily, tech support on your hosting can help a lot with issues having to do with server issues or WordPress installation issues. You should be able to fix spelling errors and other content issues on your own.
Once everything looks good, we’re on to the final stage of our website build… getting it submitted to the search engines.
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