Building Websites All-in-One For Dummies Cheat Sheet

Building a website used to mean wrestling with a pile of technical mysteries, but these days the trickiest part is often just remembering everything you're supposed to do. That's where this cheat sheet comes in. I've rounded up four short lists of the stuff you'll reach for again and again: a checklist to run through before you go live, the essentials of making your site work for everyone, some quick wins for a faster site, and the search-engine basics that genuinely move the needle. Keep this handy and you'll spend less time second-guessing and more time building.

A pre-launch checklist

There's a special kind of panic that hits about an hour before you make a website live: Did I forget something? (You probably did. Everybody does.) The cure is a checklist you run through every single time, so nothing important slips through the cracks. Here's mine:

• Proofread every page. Nothing undercuts a shiny new site faster than a typo in the headline. Read every page out loud (yes, out loud) and get a second pair of eyes on it if you can.
• Test every link. Click every link on every page. Broken links make a site feel abandoned, and they're embarrassingly easy to leave behind after last-minute edits.
• Test every form. Fill out your contact form, your signup form, your order form, all of them, and confirm that the messages arrive where they're supposed to. A form that silently swallows messages is worse than no form at all.
• Check your site on a phone. More than half your visitors will show up on a phone, so borrow a couple of devices and see how your site looks and taps. The desktop preview tells comforting lies.
• Confirm your contact details. Make sure your phone number, email, address, and hours are correct and consistent everywhere. (You'd be amazed how often last year's phone number lingers on the About page.)
• Add a custom 404 page. Visitors will eventually land on a missing page, so instead of a scary browser error, give them a friendly "Oops, that page moved" message with a link back home.
• Turn on HTTPS. Confirm your site loads with the padlock, meaning the address starts with https:// and not http://. Browsers openly shame sites that skip this, and visitors notice.
• Install your analytics. Add your visitor-tracking code before launch so you capture data from day one. Nothing stings like realizing a month later that you have no idea how launch week went.
• Set up a backup. Make sure your site is being backed up automatically, and do a test restore if you can. A backup you've never tested is just wishful thinking.
• Do a speed pass. Run your key pages through a speed tool and fix the obvious slowdowns before visitors arrive. (There's an entire list about this task on this very sheet.)
• Submit your sitemap. Create an XML sitemap and hand it to the search engines so they can find and index your pages quickly.
• Post your legal pages. Make sure your privacy policy and terms of service are live and linked in the footer. Boring? Sure. Skippable? Not anymore.

How to make your site accessible

Why bother making your site accessible? Because a big chunk of your audience, including people with low vision, limited mobility, or hearing loss (plus anyone squinting at a cracked phone screen in bright sun), will struggle if you don't. Accessible design isn't a favor you do for a few people; it's good design that happens to work for everyone. Here's where to start:

• Write real alt text. Every meaningful image needs a short description in its alt attribute so screen readers can announce it. Describe what the image shows, not that it's a picture ("Golden retriever asleep in a sunbeam," not "image123.jpg").
• Use enough color contrast. Light-gray text on a white background looks elegant to you and invisible to everyone else. Aim for strong contrast between text and its background so words stay readable.
• Don't rely on color alone. If your only cue is  that the required fields are red, anyone who can't distinguish red misses it. Add a label, an icon, or an asterisk so the meaning survives without color.
• Make it keyboard-friendly. Plenty of people navigate with the Tab key instead of a mouse. Tab through your whole site and make sure you can reach, and use, every link, button, and form field.
• Show a visible focus outline. As you Tab around, each element should get a clear highlight so keyboard users can see where they are. (Please don't strip that outline off just because it's not your favorite look.)
• Use headings in order. Give each page one main heading and then subheadings that nest logically below it. Screen-reader users jump around by heading, so a tidy outline works like a table of contents for them.
• Write descriptive link text. Click here and Read more tell a screen-reader user nothing out of context. Make the link text describe its destination, such as Download the spring menu.
• Label every form field. Connect a visible label to each input so everyone knows what goes where. A lonely box with no label is a guessing game.
• Caption your videos. Add captions to any video with speech so people who are deaf or hard of hearing (or just watching with the sound off) don't miss out.
• Keep text readable and resizable. Use a comfortable font size and let visitors zoom in without the layout falling apart. Tiny text is nobody's friend.

How to speed up your website

Does website speed matter that much? Oh, yes. Visitors are an impatient bunch, and many will bail on a page that takes more than a few seconds to show up. Search engines factor speed into their rankings, too. The good news is that a handful of tweaks usually deliver most of the gains. Here are the ones worth your time:

• Compress your images. Images are almost always the heaviest thing on a page, and most are far larger than they need to be. Resize them to the dimensions you display them, and then run them through a compressor to shrink the file size without visibly hurting the quality.
• Use modern image formats. Save photos in an efficient format such as WebP instead of older JPEG or PNG files. You'll often cut the file size by a third or more for the same picture.
• Lazy-load offscreen images. Tell the browser to hold off loading images until a visitor scrolls down toward them. That way, the top of the page appears quickly and the rest loads only if it's needed.
• Turn on caching. Caching lets a returning visitor's browser reuse files it has already downloaded instead of fetching them all over again. The payoff is a much snappier second visit.
• Trim third-party scripts. Every chat widget, social button, and tracking pixel you add drags along its own code to download and run. Audit them now and then and cut the ones you don't truly need.
• Shrink your files. Minifying strips the spaces and comments out of your style and script files to make them smaller. And combining several files into one means fewer trips back and forth to the server.
• Use a content delivery network. A CDN stores copies of your files on servers around the world, so each visitor downloads from a location near them. Someone in Tokyo shouldn't have to wait for your files to cross an ocean.
• Choose speedy hosting. Cheap, overcrowded hosting is a common (and sneaky) cause of a slow site. If you've optimized everything else and pages still crawl, your host may be the bottleneck.
• Measure before and after. Run your pages through a speed tool such as Lighthouse (built into the Chrome browser's developer tools) so you know what's truly slow instead of guessing. Fix, measure, repeat.

SEO basics that matter

Search engine optimization has a reputation as a dark art full of secret tricks. But most of it is just building a clear, useful site and describing it accurately. You don't need to chase every algorithm rumor. Nail these fundamentals and you'll be ahead of a surprising number of sites:

• Write a unique title for every page. The page title (the text in the browser tab and the big blue link in search results) is prime real estate. Give each page its own descriptive title rather than reusing the same generic name everywhere.
• Craft a helpful description. The little summary that appears under your title in search results won't directly change your ranking, but a clear, inviting one earns more clicks, so treat it like ad copy.
• Use one clear main heading. Give each page a single top-level heading (an H1) that plainly states what the page is about. It helps both readers and search engines grasp your topic at a glance.
• Keep URLs readable. A tidy web address such as /catering/wedding-cakes beats /index.php?id=4827 every time. Readable addresses are easier for people to trust and for search engines to make sense of.
• Add descriptive alt text. Search engines can't see images, so the alt text you write for accessibility does double duty by helping them understand your pictures. (One good habit, two payoffs!)
• Link between your own pages. Thoughtful internal links help visitors find related content and help search engines discover and rank your pages. If you mention your catering service, link to the catering page.
• Submit an XML sitemap. A sitemap is a simple file that lists your pages so search engines can find them all quickly. Create one and submit it through each engine's webmaster tools.
• Make sure you're mobile-friendly. Search engines primarily judge your site by its phone version, so a site that works well on a mobile device isn't just polite, it's a ranking factor.
• Publish genuinely useful content. No trick beats being the page that best answers what someone searched for. Write for humans first and make your descriptions accurate, and the rankings will tend to follow.