2/15/2020 A Go-Live checklist for a new site built with Sitecore SXA

A Go-Live checklist for a new site built with Sitecore

SXA
Mark Gibbons
Mar 24, 2019 · 4 min read

Sitecore Experience Accelerator is an absolute game-changer for companies looking to

roll-out a new site. It has so much great value out of the box that there are very few
reasons why I would decide not to use it on any new Sitecore build. Of course there’s
been plenty of other blogs and discussions on what makes SXA so great — instead let’s
delve into what needs to be done when launching a new SXA site.

Friendly Error Page and Not Found Page

All too often I come across the dreaded ASP.NET Yellow Screen Of Death when looking
at a new site. With SXA, all you need is a few clicks to have a nice customer-friendly 404
page and server error page. See here for the official documentation on how to configure
this.

One gotcha that is not covered in the official docs at time of writing is that you
need to make sure that the static error page .html file is deployed to all your CM and CD
instances. Here is some more info and helpful hints on troubleshooting issues when
setting it up and configuring.

Configure your Site Groupings

You shouldn’t be defining your SXA site as a <site> in config as you would with non-
SXA sites. Instead use the far more flexible Site Grouping. It is still possible to define an
SXA site via config instead of Site Grouping item, by setting IsSXASite=true on your site
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config. However, I’d only recommend doing this if you have a very good reason (I can’t
think of any at the moment, but I’m sure there are some customization edge cases where
this would be a good option).

I usually would check and configure the following on each Site Grouping site in the
environment.

Configure a custom link provider. If the site only supports one language then usually
you’ll want to prevent language embedding or at least enable lowercase URLs.

Configure the Host Name and Target Host Name settings.

Make sure all Database settings are set to Web if the Host Name value will be used a
CD server.

Check your site(s) in the Site Manager to make sure there’s no issues with site
ordering.

Check your Robots.txt and Sitemap.xml

These SEO things don’t take much time, but have a huge impact on search engine
rankings. By default SXA will have a “Disallow all” robots.txt, and the Sitemap.xml might
need some tweaking based on your business needs (or may require a custom link
provider as mentioned above).

Configure Robots.txt on your site settings item.

Configure Sitemap.xml

If you have multiple sites, watch out for this potential issue when using wildcard
hostnames.

Enable and Configure the Asset Optimizer

Chances are if you’re reading this is that by now you’re familiar with the Asset Optimizer,
as it is enabled by default and can be a pain to work with. But it’s worth double checking
that it’s enabled and working and none of your assets are throwing 404’s due to duplicate
asset items in the media library.

Set a Favicon
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Favicons are necessary to add that extra polish to the site. Instructions are
available here on how to configure one.

Set up Tenant and Site level security

SXA has some little-known scripts for creating some useful roles for Tenant-level and
Site-level permissions.

Standard Sitecore Go-Live tasks

This isn’t SXA specific, but here are some steps to take to ensure your Sitecore
environment is healthy. The order set here is important. Every single one of these
steps is essential and needs to complete successfully.

1. Do a full republish of master to web.

2. Rebuild all link databases.

3. Rebuild all indexes.

4. Deploy all Marketing Definitions and Taxonomies. Instructions for how to do this are
part of the Installation Guide for your version of Sitecore. One tip I can give is if it
doesn’t succeed and there’s no errors in the logs, try and deploy them one by one in
reverse order.

5. Validate all instances in your Sitecore environment. How? I’m simply going to link to
this post by Pete Navarra as it is quite definitive. One other tool that may help with
checking xConnect connectivity is xConnectHelper.

Security
There are many considerations here and every installation and implementation is
unique, but here are a few general things you can check on:

Limit access to your CM, Processing, Reporting environments using IP restrictions.

Limit access to Sitecore pages on CD servers. Either use URL Rewrite rules or deny
anonymous access.

Set good passwords on all CMS accounts — especially admin accounts.

Set good passwords on all SQL user accounts.

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Enable HTTPS only connections (e.g. via a URL rewrite rule).

Set the Secure flag on all cookies.

That’s it, if you have any questions, suggestions or comments hit me up

on Twitter or Sitecore Slack.

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