Website QA checklist before launch

1. Start with the customer journeys, not the page list

List the outcomes that matter commercially: send an inquiry, register, book, find a service, add a product to cart, complete checkout, or access an account. A site can have fifty visually correct pages and still fail at the one journey that matters.

• Write down the 3–7 most important user journeys.
• Define where each journey starts and what a successful end state looks like.
• Identify any login, email, payment, or third-party dependency involved.

2. Verify navigation and destinations

• Test header and footer navigation on desktop and mobile.
• Open primary CTAs and confirm the destination is the intended production route.
• Check for staging URLs, stale campaign pages, 404s, unexpected redirects, and dead ends.
• Use search if the site has it and verify that useful queries return meaningful results.

3. Test forms beyond the Submit button

A success message is not proof that a form worked. Test validation, the network/server outcome where you can observe it, and the actual destination of the message or lead.

• Submit valid data and confirm the expected message/lead is actually received.
• Submit incomplete and malformed values and verify useful validation.
• Check duplicate clicks or repeated submission where it could create duplicate leads.
• Repeat on mobile and confirm error messages remain visible and actionable.

4. Check responsive behavior as functionality

• Open and close mobile navigation repeatedly.
• Check sticky headers, cookie banners, chat widgets, and overlays for blocked controls.
• Verify forms remain usable without horizontal scrolling.
• Confirm important buttons are visible, reachable, and not covered by fixed elements.

5. Test accounts and ecommerce as stateful flows

Registration, login, cart, and checkout are not isolated pages. They are state transitions. Follow them from beginning to end and pay attention to what happens after each action.

• Create a test account if the scope allows it and verify the post-registration state.
• Check login/logout and the destinations after those actions.
• For ecommerce, test product options, cart quantities, removal, totals, and checkout validation.
• Verify confirmation and observable order states using only a safe agreed test setup.

6. Finish with a fix-and-retest loop

Do not close an issue because code changed. Reproduce the original steps after the fix, then run the surrounding journey once more to catch regressions. Keep a short record of what passed as well as what failed.

If the site is commercially important, an independent pre-launch QA pass is valuable because the delivery team is no longer the only group verifying its own implementation.