Every team has a launch horror story: the typo in the hero headline, the broken form nobody submitted in staging, the mobile menu that never opened on a real phone. A website QA checklist exists so those stories happen to other teams. This is the checklist we use — 27 checks, ordered the way you should run them, with notes on the ones people skip.
How to use it: run one pass per section, on the real staging site — not on screenshots. Log every issue as a comment pinned to the exact element, so each fix is unambiguous and trackable. Vague notes are how launch bugs survive QA.
Content & copy (1–5)
- 1Read every page out loud once. Your eyes skip typos; your ears do not.
- 2Check names, prices, dates, and phone numbers against the source of truth — the most embarrassing bugs are factual, not technical.
- 3Click every link, including footer and legal pages. No 404s, no "#" placeholders.
- 4Confirm placeholder text is gone: lorem ipsum, TODO, "Insert headline here", template stock copy.
- 5Verify the 404 page itself exists, matches the brand, and links back home.
Design accuracy (6–10)
This is where the most review time is wasted — design in one tab, site in another, switching back and forth trying to remember what you just saw. Overlay the design on the live page instead and the mismatches reveal themselves.
- 1Compare each page against its design with an overlay at ~50% opacity — spacing, font sizes, and alignment drift jump out immediately.
- 2Check section order matches the design. Builds quietly reorder things more often than you think.
- 3Verify colors against the palette — buttons, links, hover states, not just backgrounds.
- 4Check font weights and line heights; a swapped 500/600 weight is invisible in a screenshot and obvious in an overlay.
- 5Confirm image crops and focal points match the design, especially on cards and heroes.
The fastest way to run checks 6–10 is an overlay with an opacity slider, right on the live page: How design compare works in UX Peeker →
Responsive & cross-device (11–14)
- 1Review every page at desktop, tablet, and at least two phone widths — not just "shrink the browser a bit".
- 2Open the mobile navigation on every template. The burger menu is the most-shipped broken component on the web.
- 3Check text wrapping at narrow widths: headlines that break mid-word, buttons that wrap to two lines, overflowing tables.
- 4Verify touch targets — anything tappable should work with a thumb, not just a cursor.
Functionality (15–19)
- 1Submit every form for real — and confirm the submission actually arrives (inbox, CRM, or database), not just that the success message shows.
- 2Test form validation with bad input: wrong email formats, empty required fields, absurd values.
- 3Check third-party embeds load: maps, calendars, chat widgets, payment elements.
- 4Exercise interactive components in every state: sliders, accordions, tabs, modals, filters — open, close, empty, error.
- 5Verify redirects from any old URLs, and that http and www variants land on one canonical domain.
Performance (20–22)
- 1Run PageSpeed Insights on the top pages; fix anything that drags Core Web Vitals into the red — launch traffic makes slow pages slower.
- 2Check image weight: anything over ~300 KB needs compression or a modern format (WebP/AVIF), and below-the-fold media should lazy-load.
- 3Load the site on a mid-range phone over mobile data once. Numbers lie less than lab scores.
SEO basics (23–25)
- 1Every page has a unique title tag and meta description with its target keyword — no duplicates, no "Home".
- 2One H1 per page, canonical URLs set, and the sitemap.xml submitted in Search Console.
- 3Check robots rules: staging noindex REMOVED on production (the classic), app/admin routes still excluded.
Accessibility & legal (26–27)
- 1Keyboard-only pass: tab through the page — visible focus states, skip link, no keyboard traps. Then check alt text on meaningful images and color contrast on text.
- 2Confirm the legal set: privacy policy, terms, cookie consent if required, and a working unsubscribe on any email capture.
Run the whole checklist without tab switching
The checklist is the easy half. The hard half is logistics: keeping the design comparison, the live site, the issue list, and the fix tracking from sprawling across four tools. That sprawl is where checks get skipped.
UX Peeker puts the whole QA pass in one place: the live site mirrored for review, the design overlaid with an opacity slider, every issue pinned to the exact element as a comment, and every comment automatically tracked as a task. Clients and stakeholders join through one link with no account — so the final sign-off happens where the issues were found.
Start your next pre-launch QA pass on the live site: The website feedback tool for live pages →