6 Things to Do in Your First Week With a New Business Website

Your new website is live. Great. Now what?

A lot of business owners launch a site and then go quiet for months, assuming Google will magically start sending customers. It does not work that way. The first week is when you set the foundations that decide whether your site actually does its job or just sits there looking pretty.

Here are 6 things to do in your first week. None of them take more than an hour. All of them matter.

1. Submit your site to Google Search Console

Google needs to know your site exists. It usually figures this out eventually, but "eventually" can mean weeks of being invisible. Search Console speeds this up dramatically and gives you tools to monitor how your site is performing in search.

Go to search.google.com/search-console and add your site. Verify ownership (usually a DNS record or HTML file). Submit your sitemap.xml. That is it for week one. The data takes a few weeks to populate but you have now got a direct line to how Google sees your site.

If you worked with a designer, this should already be done. Ask them. If not, do it yourself, it takes 15 minutes.

2. Set up or claim your Google Business Profile

If your business is local in any way, this is the highest-return task on the list. A Google Business Profile gets you on Google Maps, into the local search pack (that 3-result map box at the top of search), and surfaces your business to customers actively looking for what you offer.

A profile takes 30 minutes to set up and is free. We wrote a separate post on the 5 things a Google Business Profile does that your website cannot. Go through that one too if you have not already.

If you have an old profile from years ago that you forgot about, claim it. Do not create a duplicate. Google takes that badly.

3. Add your website everywhere your business shows up

Your website only works if people know it exists. Walk through every place your business has a presence and make sure your URL is there.

The usual list:

• Email signatures (yours and any team members)
• Business cards
• Invoice templates and quote forms
• Vehicle signage if you have it
• Social media bios (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram)
• Any directory listings (Yellow Pages, True Local, Bark, industry-specific directories)
• Voicemail message ("visit us at...")
• Out-of-office email replies
• Receipts or printed material

This sounds obvious but most business owners only update half of these and then wonder why traffic is low. Do all of them in one sitting.

4. Run a Google PageSpeed test and fix obvious issues

Open pagespeed.web.dev and run your homepage through it. You will get two scores, one for mobile and one for desktop, plus a list of suggestions.

For a business website you want at least 80 on mobile and 90 on desktop. Anything lower and you are losing visitors who bounce before the page loads. Customers do not wait. A slow site costs you leads even if it ranks well.

If your scores are low, the fixes usually fall into a few categories: images that are too big, scripts that load too early, fonts that block rendering, hosting that is slow. A good web designer will have handled most of this for you. If you built the site yourself or used a template builder, this is where you might need help.

Run the test, save the results, and either fix the issues or get them fixed within the first week. Performance gets harder to fix the longer you wait.

5. Set up Google Analytics so you actually know what is happening

Without analytics you are flying blind. You have no idea how many people visit, where they come from, what pages they look at, or how long they stay. You cannot improve what you cannot measure.

Set up Google Analytics 4 at analytics.google.com. Create a property for your site, get the tracking code (a small snippet starting with G-XXXXXXX), and either add it to your site yourself or send it to your web designer to install. Most decent designers will set this up for you as part of the build, so ask first.

Once installed, do not check it obsessively in week one. The data needs time to be useful. Set a reminder to look at it properly in 30 days. The things worth watching are: which pages get the most visits, how visitors find your site, and how often visitors actually contact you. Vanity metrics like "total visits" matter less than you think.

6. Set up a simple system for capturing and replying to leads

This is the one most business owners skip and then complain about getting no leads from their website.

Three questions to answer honestly:

Where do contact form submissions go?
Probably your email. Make sure it is not landing in spam. Send yourself a test submission from your phone, on mobile data, with a Gmail address you do not normally use. If it does not arrive within a minute, the form is broken or your filters are rejecting it.

How fast will you reply?
Studies on lead response times all say the same thing. Replies within an hour convert dramatically better than replies after 24 hours. Set a personal rule: every form submission gets a reply within 4 hours during business days. If you cannot meet that, you have a process problem to fix.

Who is responsible if you are away?
If you work alone, this means setting up an auto-reply that tells the prospect when they will hear back. "Thanks, I will reply by Tuesday morning" beats silence every time. If you have a team, decide who owns lead replies and back them up.

A great website with a broken lead capture process is worse than no website at all. It costs you the leads you could have had.

Bottom line

A website is not a one-time project. Launch day is the start, not the end. The 6 things above take maybe 3 to 4 hours total in the first week, and they decide whether your site becomes a real business asset or just a thing that exists.

If you worked with a decent web designer, most of these should already be done or set up for you. If you are not sure, ask them. We do the first three as part of every project at Framely because handing over a site without these in place is doing the client a disservice.

If you launched your site recently and have not done these yet, this week is the time. Three or four hours of work now saves you months of confusion later.