A thorough quality assurance guide to verify your website is pixel-perfect, accessible, and fully production-ready before going live.
The hour before launch is the wrong time to find a broken form. Run this list on the staging site, fix what it finds, then run the launch-day section again against production.
Content and copy
- Proofread every page. Read the copy aloud to catch the sentences that do not work.
- Check that no placeholder text survives, including Lorem Ipsum in hidden components.
- Confirm every price, phone number, address and legal name is current.
- Confirm the copyright year and the company registration details.
- Check that names, capitalisation and product terms are used consistently.
Links and navigation
- Crawl the site and fix every broken internal link.
- Check every external link. Open third-party links in a new tab where it helps.
- Confirm the logo links to the homepage.
- Confirm the navigation marks the current page.
- Check the footer links, including the legal pages.
- Confirm the 404 page is helpful and offers a route back.
Forms
- Submit every form with valid data and confirm the record arrives.
- Submit every form with invalid data and confirm the errors are clear and specific.
- Confirm required fields are marked, and that the marking is not colour alone.
- Confirm the success message or thank-you page appears.
- Confirm the notification email reaches the right inbox, and check the spam folder.
- Confirm spam protection works and does not block real users.
- Confirm the privacy consent text and the checkbox behaviour match your policy.
Responsive and cross-browser
- Test on a real phone, not only in a resized browser window.
- Test the common breakpoints: 360, 768, 1024, 1440 and 1920 pixels wide.
- Test in Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge.
- Test on iOS Safari specifically. It fails differently from desktop Safari.
- Confirm no page scrolls horizontally at any width.
- Confirm tap targets are at least 44 by 44 pixels.
- Test in landscape orientation on a phone.
Accessibility
- Navigate the main flows with the keyboard alone.
- Confirm the focus indicator is always visible.
- Check colour contrast on text, buttons and form fields.
- Confirm every meaningful image has alt text and every decorative image has empty alt.
- Confirm headings run in order and each page has one H1.
- Test the primary flow with a screen reader.
- Confirm video has captions and audio has a transcript.
Performance
- Run Lighthouse on the templates that matter, not only the homepage.
- Confirm images are compressed, correctly sized and served in a modern format.
- Confirm the largest contentful element loads eagerly and everything below the fold is lazy.
- Set explicit width and height on images to stop layout shift.
- Confirm fonts are preloaded and that text stays visible while they load.
- Remove unused CSS and JavaScript from the critical path.
Technical and launch day
- Confirm every page has a unique title and meta description.
- Confirm canonical tags point at the live URLs, not at staging.
- Remove the noindex tag and confirm robots.txt allows crawling.
- Confirm the favicon and the social share image render correctly.
- Test the share card on the platforms you actually use.
- Confirm the SSL certificate is valid and every asset loads over HTTPS.
- Confirm analytics, consent management and any advertising pixels fire once, not twice.
- Take a full backup of the site and the database before you switch DNS.