Website Quality Assurance Checklist: What You Need to Review

Quality assurance (QA) is a set of activities that checks your website design for any bugs or errors, weaknesses, and potential points of failure before it goes live. This process aims to deliver your website to a level of excellence. Due to the complexity and a large number of variables involved in the development process, our web design agency has created the step by step process with a website quality assurance testing checklist to help you deliver stellar results upon site launch. Are you ready to become a quality assurance guru? Dive right in.

Table of content

• Design
• Navigation and accessibility
• Content
• Validation testing
• Forms and input validation
• eCommerce
• SEO

Let’s touch a few bases before we dive into our website testing checklist. Keep in mind that various mobile devices, screen resolutions, browsers, internet connections, and operating systems play a significant role in the way a website is delivered to end users in order to meet our quality benchmark. All of these factors impact the performance of your online business. This article is not created for blog free WordPress themes; it is designed for custom WordPress website design in mind, as outlined in our website creation workflow article. Bare in mind that the more complex the website, the more time needs to be dedicated to quality assurance website testing.

A basic brochure website may be tested in an hour or so. On the other hand, a large website with custom functionality, advanced interactive elements, or an eCommerce website may require several days of testing. Make sure to distinguish website design QA from software quality assurance testing done by app developers, as these two are different enough to warrant differences being pointed out.

Our website QA checklist template will ensure that your website functions optimally across the widest range of devices, screen sizes, and variations possible while also ensuring the functionality of important business features working properly.

Design QA – Test even before Coding

While many people associate QA with a process of website development life cycle, here at Alpha Efficiency, we start with QA in the design phase itself. The first template you should create for your own organization would be design quality-assurance list. Every online business depends on reliable usage of a pre-code checklist to ensure that all elements needed to successfully complete the site are there before the web development team hits a roadblock.

Consider design QA as a step that happens before a website or web application goes into production. While Design QA is a part of the website quality assurance testing, it can also be separated, especially in circumstances where we deliver the design without actually delivering the web development project itself.

Design team members are there to ensure that design integrity is respected throughout the responsive delivery of their work, but the design team also needs to be held to a higher standard.

Design QA and pre-coding checklist

Designers can routinely forget to check for issues such as creative commons sharealike license on the stock photography that they provide. It is not uncommon for us to obtain the design from third-party vendors with images that aren’t licensed. This is why we’ve addressed this issue in order to help our clients to ensure a safe and lawsuit-free website launch.

When the design is completed, we ensure the following:

• All pages are present so that website can function properly.
• At the bare minimum, it includes the following pages
  • Homepage
  • Blog page
  • Blog post
  • Default page (if the site is using content management systems cms)
  • Category and Tag pages
  • Contact page
• Ensuring that all images have the necessary licenses before we start coding
• Favicon
• All digital assets prepared for responsiveness

Besides QA team checking the design files, we also make sure that developers check off that they have everything ready. You will want to make sure that your functional testing starts no later than the final stage of the design, aka client, confirming the design before starting the production of the website.

QA Completed By Web Development Team

Visitors will use different browsers and mobile devices to access your website. This is why you need to test and see if your design works well in every browser:

• Chrome
• Opera
• Internet Explorer
• Firefox
• Safari

For this stage of the process, you may use a design checker tool such as a responsive design checker to ensure that the website design is intact when transferred to a responsive environment.

This includes aspects such as font size, font style, spacing, and color scheme. Plugins, links, and search fields can make or break your website, so make sure these function properly on both your home and landing pages. To check whether your website is mobile responsive, access it via various mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.

Various visitors use various operating systems, so optimizing for just one of them is not enough. To ensure that your website functions properly, test it across all operating systems:

• Windows
• Mac OS
• Android
• Linux
• iOS

As well as different laptop and desktop screen sizes:

• 1024×768
• 1280×800
• 1366×768
• 1920×1080

While you’re at it, we suggest checking for these as well just to make sure your website is providing the best user experience possible:

• Intrusive pop-ups
• Phone numbers and email addresses are linked up properly
• Buttons and icons are large enough so even people with large fingers can use them seamlessly
• Website navigation is simple, and the content layout has been optimized
• Inactive elements and custom functionality performs properly regardless of the device or screen size

Website Quality Assurance Check Done by a web application

Besides manual user testing, we also rely on a plethora of tools that fall on our qa checklist. One of the apps we use to ensure that things are working smoothly is ahrefs broken link checker, but we also rely on Google Search Console as well as SEMRush. Before pushing the website to production, we always perform 3rd party tools for the final website quality assurance check. This allows us to cover the website software development life cycle more efficiently.

Humans can’t be as efficient as the tools for app cross browser testing, hence tools are an indispensable part of the website qa testing. Besides our website test checklist, always rely on software testing websites (and website) as well, such as:

• Softwaretestpro.com
• Softwaretestinghelp.com
• Ministryoftesting.com
• uTest.com

A web application can minimize the chance of human error by providing a secure process, tracking responsive layouts, and storing error data. A web application also can use automated processes to keep track of developers’ processes so that if a mistake is made, it can be tracked quickly before reaching production.

Navigation and accessibility

Your website needs to be developed with navigation and accessibility in mind. This should be done in a way that allows users to easily navigate the site and reach desired outcomes. Accessibility is extremely important since it helps you extend your audience reach as well as market share. Here is what you need to check:

• See whether all images have the appropriate resolution
• Check whether your audio content works
• Check the color to see if the choices harmonize. Also, if the information is conveyed with color, it needs to be visible without the color as well.
• Check whether all of your images have alt tags and comprehensive descriptions
• Look at the way you use language on your website and make sure that all abbreviations are properly explained
• Ensure that your captions are descriptive and available
• Make sure your website can be navigated only by using the keyboard
• See if the content is lined up properly
• Check whether the images are readable once you zoom out

Content Proofreading and Plagiarism tests

Our website testing checklist considers the quality of your content as extremely important. It needs to be informative and logically structured so it would be easy to follow. Your choice of colors and fonts needs to be such that it never compromises the readability of the content.

Make sure to check all of your published articles for grammar, spelling, punctuation, or lexical mistakes. If you are not very confident in your lexical prowess, there is a ton of free online platforms that can help you. Also, ensure there is no lorem ipsum content left.

Your images should be in high resolution, appropriately cropped, and optimized in a way that has no negative impact on the loading speed of your website. If there are audio, video, or flash elements on your website, you need to have all the transcriptions and plain text elements in place.

This goes without saying – don’t forget to scan all files for viruses and malware before they go live.

Validation testing process

This step of our website quality assurance checklist ensures that your site meets the requirements of our clients. Besides looking great, your website needs to function well. There are many online tools that can help you with validation testing and check for cross-browser errors, HTML errors, CSS errors, and much more. Here are some of our favorite tools:

• Webpage analyzer (this tool tests the general performance of your website)
• CSS validator (tests HTML documents and Cascading Style Sheets)
• XML checker and validator (this tool will determine the format and validity of your XML documents)
• Robots checker (checks the syntax of the robots.txt file)

Now that we gave you the list of our preferred tools, here is what validation testing includes:

• Looking if the CSS contains display and style components
• Checking internal, external, mail, and broken links
• Checking whether the internal hyperlinks are relative. We also recommend manually opening all the links to make sure they lead to the desired websites.
• Ensuring that the links are not leading to the same pages
• Looking to see if every page of your website has a valid XHTML
• Eliminating all dead-end web pages so your website would provide users with a fast and clear navigation path

Forms and input validation

For most businesses, forms are arguably the most important section of a website. This is where you collect leads and interact with your future customers. It is also the place where you provide your users with info on how to get in touch with your support team. If your contact forms don’t work as intended, you are doing nothing more than wasting your budget.

During this step of our quality assurance checklist, you should complete all input fields on your website. This includes a contact form submission, account setup, login, quizzes, and questionnaires. You need to ensure that all the fields, such as optional and required, function as they are supposed to. We suggest sending a couple of test emails just to make sure they are sent and delivered to the right address.

eCommerceWebsite QA Testing

As an agency that offers eCommerce web design services, we are well aware of the added attention that eCommerce websites require. This is mostly due to the large number of pages and an advanced level of functionality incorporated into these kinds of websites. Here is what you need to look into:

• Check individual product pages and make sure they have no errors or missing content
• Ensure that the shopping cart is updated each time you increase the number of your products, edit the contents, or someone makes a purchase
• Check your discounts and coupons to make sure they function as they should
• Make sure that products are displayed correctly
• Eliminate duplicated products if there are any
• Check whether filtering options are functioning correctly
• Make sure that currency converters are set correctly
• Ensure that shipping costs are calculated correctly based on region and taxes
• Check notification emails to see if they are triggered and received as intended

Without a doubt, the most important factor of any eCommerce website is the payment gateway process. This testing requires extra care, so we recommend approaching it as if you were a customer using the website. With that in mind, here is what you should check:

• Look at all the payment options you are offering (PayPal, Payoneer, Credit Card, Online Banking…) to make sure the payment gateway is working properly.
• Check your account creation process. It should be simple and engaging.
• See whether the customer is reminded to register for an account during guest checkout.
• Take a look at your login and checkout options and ensure they function correctly.
• Check page timeout limits
• Make sure that confirmation emails are being sent and delivered as they should.

Most of the customers that will visit your website will come with a specific product in mind. This is why it is critical to check your search functionality across the site. The algorithm should be set up in a way that seamlessly directs the searcher to the most relevant product.

SEO Website QA Checklist

If you are one of our regular readers, by now, you are certainly aware of just how much we stress the importance of search engine optimization, and there is a strong reason why it is a part of our website qa checklist. This stage of our website quality assurance checklist will ensure that your website is fully optimized for search engines. Here are the steps you need to take in order to test your website as thoroughly as possible:

• Check all of your titles, tags, and meta descriptions. Make sure they are short, informative, and include keywords.
• Check for broken links with screaming frog or Ahrefs
• See if your social media icons are linked correctly.
• Check all of the images published on your site. Do they have ALT tags within the IMG tag? If not, ensure that they do since this is amongst the key elements that influence your SEO ranking.
• Redirect all of your old pages to new ones.
• Test all links to www.
• Keep your URLs short. Shorter URLs are more SEO-friendly.
• The robots.txt file is the main indicator of your general SEO performance thanks to which search engines estimate which parts of your website should be indexed. Make sure that the robots.txt file is present.
• Check if the HTML site map is set up within Google.
• Ensure that Google Analytics and tracking has been set up to track and monitor website visitors, goals, and engagement to get the bigger picture of your website’s performance.
• Check if the website is displaying properly on handheld devices such as mobiles and tablets. We have dedicated an entire article to adaptive and responsive web design to ensure your website displays properly across all platforms.
• Keep loading speed under 1.5 seconds. A website that loads fast on both desktop and mobile makes for a great user experience (UX) as well as high SERP rankings.
• Make sure your website has been validated for syntax errors so it would be crawlable by search engines.

Final Words Before Your Site Launch

Quality Assurance website testing is a process that requires a lot of time, but it instantly pays dividends. A website test checklist allows you to detect any bugs or possible shortcomings of your website at an early stage – before it even goes live. More complex websites often require several rounds of QA testing. As this makes for a lot of hard work, we hope that our website Quality Assurance checklist will come in handy so you wouldn’t find yourself in that Have I missed anything? situation.

Before we say read you later, there is one more thing to highlight: outstanding Quality Assurance testing is extremely difficult without well-coordinated teamwork. Alpha Efficiency offers experience and expertise so that your team can focus on their daily duties. We will communicate all of the findings with you and create detailed bug descriptions before our developers do their magic. We look forward to hearing from you. We wish you a super successful website launch!