Pre-Launch QA Checklist

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.