Webflow Post-Launch Checklist

all right guys this is the last lesson

of the webflow course

so we know that webflow has some basic

analytics

so if you go over to your webflow

general settings you're going to have

some basic

statistics how many visitors you have

and how many views and the bandwidth but

these analytics

are very uh simple very basic

what i want to show you guys is the

ability for us to have

a little bit more control over who's

visiting what device they're coming from

where the actual users are coming from

and a bunch of other features that

webflow does not

provide if you open up your cloudflare

again you will see that they do have

some analytics but again these are very

basic

statistics so the way we do this is we

create an account with google

analytics and you will see something

like this

where you have three columns to create

the account so that would be the primary

account

that you want to use then you have a

create a property

and this is the one we want and then

create a view is just additional views

of that same property now the property

what it

what it means is just creating a website

or or

linking it to a to a domain

so we're gonna click create property

and right away we get asked a couple of

options

we're gonna select the first one which

is web

we're going to put in the site the name

pretty simple

and we're going to put in the domain so

just like that

streamvr.app we want to make sure that

we use the

secured uh url so that's within https

rather than the http this is actually

the way we've set up or how

typically webflow sets up the site

because it uses

a certificate so you can see here this

ssl stands out

and you can see the connection is secure

so that's the one we want to select

the industry you can you know put

anything i'm going to just put in here

entertainment reporting time zone that's

up to you we're just gonna keep it the

way it is

okay once you've created that property

the next step is to

add that code over to your site so that

google can start tracking

all the analytics now right away you get

the tracking

id and a script

that you can just simply copy over into

your custom code

but because webflow already considers

the integrations you just need to go

over to

your integrations tab and on the first

form field it's going to ask you the

universal tracking id so all you have to

do

is copy that id that you get paste it

over to your workflow

and that's pretty much it you save the

changes

and then you can publish the site so

that we can

test if that the code is if the code is

connected correctly

so i'm going to go ahead and publish

that what's going to happen is once

you've

connected the site you're going to see a

little status report here on the top

of the google tracking id section

another thing you could do

is simply go over to the home page

now that you've created that property

you'll see that over here with the

breadcrumb of the stream vr

you're gonna see a series of dashboards

where you can track

some really cool stuff so you can see

here we have

different reports you have the real time

report the audience and

acquisition and all these are can be

summarized in the home page but if you

go into each one of these

you get additional information like an

overview

the locations where they're coming from

live

live users from different from around

the world

and all this data all this analytics is

only possible with a

with a tool like this and the best thing

of course is that google analytics

is free and it's best practice to always

connect this

on every project that you are going to

work on

so that you can start tracking this data

there's a lot of advanced tools in here

that we won't be covering in this lesson

but what i want you to know is that once

you have that connected it'll be easier

for us

to start tracking additional information

all right guys

so the next and final thing that i do is

set up the google search console

okay so the google search console is

something that i always

add into a every project or this used to

be called

webmaster tools not too long ago and

they've rebranded it

but now the google search console will

help us

submit the pages that we create

on our site over to google so he

starts indexing all the pages as soon as

possible

so this is just going to help google

understand what your site has

all the sub pages and all that we need

to understand the sitemap.xml which is a

little document

that webflow creates for us so we go

over to our domain

and we type in at the end of the url

sitemap.xml

so you have the home page the playground

and the movies and the search now we

need to send that over to google

and that's where search console comes in

handy so the first thing i'm going to do

is add the property

and in the at the property there's two

ways we can do this

through domain or through url prefix

now domain what it does it so it just

crossed throughout all the site

right so even sub domains url prefix

though it's specifically

for a page section or if you have a

website where you have different domains

that you want to specifically track

you can use the url prefix so i

recommend we we go with the domain

so i'm going to put in here streamvr.app

we need to add this exact little code

into our dns provider right so if we go

over to

our dns provider in this case cloudflare

we just simply have to create

a text record and copied and paste

this code in there so i'm going to do

that right now

all right there we go so we have the

ownership verified so we click on

go to property and that will give us

some additional settings over here

in our search console so the first thing

i want to do is

just head over to our sitemaps and

right here we want to add the new

sitemap that

we got from webflow so we simply grab

the url the sitemap.xml and with along

with the url

and paste that over here

and click submit right so this will

probably take a little bit

until the actual depending on your site

size or how many urls you have created

google will automatically start

indexing those pages this does not mean

that as soon as you submit this sitemap

your site is going to start ranking on

google

what this does is just lets google know

that your pages exist the url exists

along with what we talked about earlier

where you have backlinks and relevant

content outbound links

i think all the spiders are going to

start collecting all your content

and indexing slowly but surely

into the google search and engine

results page

and that's exactly what we want there's

two last things that i want to mention

to you guys that our best practices when

we

have launched our site so webflow gives

us

a template called the 404 template

this template you could customize it

however you want

but ideally what we want to do is have

the page

redirect the users back home and just

give them a little warm message

telling them that the site that they're

landed it doesn't exist

but they can still return to the home

page

and or use the search tool to find what

they're looking for

so this is generally good practice to do

you want to make sure you customize this

page

maybe add a call to action that just

sends them back

to safety or sends them back home and

head over to

the hosting section

and you'll find a little category called

the 301 redirects

so this is actually really handy for

when you have those old

urls and you want to redirect them to

the new url

you want to make sure you do this every

time you've made a change to

a to a blog post or in this case

movies or games so that google when it

starts to crawl your site it doesn't

hit some errors because we've connected

the google search console

are going to start appearing in our

in our dashboard so just a heads up 301s

super important that we have those added

if we if we're changing a lot of urls

and making sure that your 404 page is

nicely customized

this has been a long journey into

one of my favorite tools right now to

create

interactive and engaging sites using

webflow

i'm really excited that you guys made it

this far can't wait to see you

on the next course where we're going to

overcome

some of the limitations that webflow

has with craft cms

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