Website QA Checklist Before Launch

Website QA before launch is the evidence that the new site works beyond the designer's screen. It checks customer paths, search foundations, data, integrations, accessibility, performance, ownership, and recovery.

Test with real scenarios and record expected result, actual result, owner, severity, fix, and retest. A checklist is only useful when each item has evidence.

Page and navigation checks

• Every approved page loads at the intended URL.
• Navigation, footer, breadcrumbs, search, and related links work.
• 404, empty, unavailable, sold, and error states are useful and honest.
• Images, downloads, icons, embeds, and external links load correctly.
• Titles, headings, descriptions, dates, prices, hours, and policies are correct.

Forms and customer actions

Submit contact, quote, booking, checkout, application, upload, and login flows on mobile and desktop. Test valid, missing, invalid, duplicate, cancelled, and failed requests.

Verify confirmation, email or text notification, CRM or queue record, assignment, source, context, analytics, and human follow-up. See quote form best practices and lead routing.

Responsive and accessibility checks

Test narrow and wide screens, zoom, large text, keyboard navigation, focus states, labels, contrast, headings, alt text, error messages, motion, and touch targets. Use the primary customer action with a keyboard and a screen reader where possible.

Performance checks

Measure key pages with real images, analytics, maps, chat, booking, and other third-party tools active. Check initial response, largest content, layout shift, scripts, image sizes, caching, and mobile behavior.

Fix the largest causes first. A faster home page does not compensate for a slow form or inventory page that customers actually use.

SEO and migration checks

• Canonical URLs point to the intended page.
• Robots rules do not block important pages.
• XML sitemap contains intended URLs and no obsolete paths.
• Redirects resolve in one step and do not loop.
• Internal links point to current pages.
• Structured information matches visible content.
• Open Graph and social images use the correct page context.

The redirect audit checklist provides more detail for migrations.

Analytics and integrations

Confirm analytics events fire once, consent choices behave as intended, campaigns preserve source, and reports receive the right data. Test payment, CRM, calendar, inventory, email, search, chat, and API connections including timeouts and provider failures.

Security and ownership

Review HTTPS, authentication, roles, secret storage, file access, admin users, backups, rate limits, headers, dependency updates, and deployment permissions. Confirm the business has access to the domain, hosting, code, analytics, provider accounts, and data exports.

Launch and rollback

Choose a launch window with an owner, monitoring, communication, backup, rollback, and post-launch verification. Keep the current deployment recoverable until the new site proves stable.

A website passes QA when the customer path works, the business can operate it, search systems can understand it, and the team knows what to do when an external dependency fails.