Picking the best weekday for a website launch
Picking the best weekday for a website launch can be difficult. When considering it, there are a number of key things to take in to account:
Expected traffic / business volume
Launching on the busiest day of the month is not likely to be the best choice - a trail by fire can be risky especially for a major launch. Picking a quiet time of the month - check your sales & website analytics - will mean less lost revenue & annoyed customers and stress if things do go wrong.
Developer availability
Launching at the end of the week might seem like a nice way of finishing the week off - but teething problems might mean work over the weekend. This isn't good for keeping your developers happy!
Launching early in the week (unless of course this is your busiest period) is going to mean more normal working time to work on any (hopefully minor) issues you come across. Should there be a disaster, the whole team will be around anyway.
Support availability
Although your hosting provider probably does operate over a weekend, they are likely to have more staff around during normal working hours.
Phoning them before hand will be a good idea to make sure:
- There are no scheduled maintenance windows of their network, your server or any of their peers.
- If they manage backups that there is a current one (can't hurt to ask if you can't check yourself for some reason).
- They have staff around at the time you are expecting to launch and that they are aware this is happening - this is especially important if they monitor your servers (they may think something has failed).
