The website review checklist

The cheapest problems to fix and the ones clients notice first. Do this pass before anyone looks at spacing.

• No lorem ipsum or placeholder text left anywhereCheck the pages nobody demos: 404, thank-you, empty states, form confirmations.
• Spelling and grammar checked on every pageRead it out loud, or paste it somewhere with a checker. Headlines get typos more than body copy because nobody proofreads six words.
• Client name, product names and job titles spelled correctlyThe single most damaging typo class. Verify against something the client wrote, not against the brief.
• No stale dates, years or 'coming soon' that already cameCopyright year, event dates, 'launching in spring'.
• Phone, email and address are real and currentActually dial the number and send the email. A tel: link with a digit missing looks fine and fails silently.
• Privacy policy, cookie policy and terms exist and are reachableReachable from every page, usually the footer. If the site sets analytics cookies, the policy has to say so.
• Tone is consistent across pagesPages written at different times drift. Watch for one page saying 'we' and another saying 'I'.

Most traffic is a phone. Most reviews happen on a laptop. That gap is where the embarrassing bugs live.

• Checked on a real phone, not just a resized windowEmulators do not reproduce touch targets, momentum scroll, or the browser chrome eating vertical space.
• Nothing scrolls sidewaysA single wide element — a table, a long unbroken word, a fixed-width image — makes the whole page shift. Scroll to the bottom of every page and check.
• Navigation works on touch, including submenusHover-only menus are unreachable on a phone. Check the menu closes again, and that it does not trap scroll behind it.
• Tap targets are big enough and not crowdedAround 44px. Adjacent links in a footer are the usual offender.
• Checked at tablet widthThe width nobody designs for, where a three-column grid becomes two-and-a-half.
• Landscape on a phone does not break anythingFull-height hero sections are the usual casualty.

Where 'it just feels off' usually comes from.

• Heading sizes step down consistentlyAn h3 bigger than the h2 above it on one page means someone styled by eye.
• Line length is comfortable on wide screensRoughly 60-80 characters. Full-width paragraphs on a 27-inch monitor are unreadable.
• No awkward single-word lines in headlinesCheck at the breakpoints, not just at your window width.
• Fonts load, and there is no jarring swapThrottle the network and reload. A flash of the fallback font is fine; a layout that jumps half a screen is not.
• Spacing is consistent between comparable sectionsPick two similar sections and measure. Ad-hoc padding accumulates over a build.
• Elements line up on a shared gridLook down the left edge of the page. Anything a few pixels out is visible even to people who cannot name what is wrong.

The things that are either working or losing the client money.

• No broken linksInternal and external. External links rot quietly after launch.
• External links open in a new tab, with rel=noopenerConsistently — not new tab on one page and same tab on another.
• Every form actually submits and you received the resultTest each one end to end. A form that shows a success message and emails nobody is the most common launch bug there is.
• Validation messages are clear and appear near the fieldTry submitting empty, with a bad email, and with a very long value.
• There is a real confirmation after submittingA visitor who is not sure it worked will submit again, or leave.
• Some spam protection is in placeOtherwise the client's inbox is full within a week and they stop reading it.
• Every call to action goes where it saysEspecially duplicated CTAs — the one in the footer is usually the one nobody re-tested.

The main cause of a slow site, and the easiest thing to fix late.

• No stretched or squashed imagesLook at faces and logos. Distortion is obvious there and invisible in a landscape photo.
• Images are sized and compressed for the webA 4MB hero photo is a slow site with no other cause. Check the largest file on the page.
• Meaningful images have alt text; decorative ones are marked emptyAlt text describes what the image conveys, not what it contains. A decorative flourish takes alt="".
• Images are sharp on a high-density screenLogos and screenshots suffer most.
• Video does not autoplay with soundIf it autoplays at all, it should be muted, and there should be a way to stop it.
• Favicon and social share image are setPaste the URL into a chat app and look at the preview. A missing OG image is the first thing anyone sharing the site will see.

A legal requirement in a growing number of places, and the fastest way to find real usability bugs.

• The whole site is usable with the keyboard aloneTab through a page. You should be able to reach and activate every control, and never get stuck.
• Focus is always visibleIf someone removed the default outline without replacing it, keyboard users are navigating blind.
• Text contrast passesGrey-on-white body copy and white-on-pale-image headlines are the two that always fail.
• Form fields have real labelsA placeholder is not a label: it disappears when you start typing, and screen readers may not announce it.
• Headings describe the structure, one h1 per pageDo not pick a heading level for its size.
• Animation respects reduced-motionAnything that moves a lot should stop for people who ask the system to reduce motion.
• The page works zoomed to 200%Nothing should be cut off or overlap.

Ten minutes here saves a conversation six months later.

• Every page has its own title and meta descriptionDuplicated across pages is the default when a template goes unedited.
• No leftover noindex from stagingThe single most expensive launch mistake. Check the live site, not the config file.
• robots.txt does not block anything importantAlso check what any CDN or proxy adds to it.
• A sitemap exists and lists real, indexable URLsA sitemap listing noindex pages sends a contradictory signal.
• Canonical URLs are set and point at the right pageEspecially if the site is reachable at both www and the apex.
• One canonical hostname: www or apex, not both serving 200Two hostnames serving the same content split your ranking signals. One should redirect to the other.
• http redirects to httpsTest with curl or a private window; your browser may be remembering the secure version.
• Open Graph and Twitter card tags are setPaste a URL into a chat app and look at what appears.

Measure before optimising, and measure on a phone connection.

• The main content appears quicklyUsually the hero image or headline. If it is an image, it should not be lazy-loaded.
• Nothing jumps around as the page loadsImages without dimensions, late-loading fonts and injected banners are the causes.
• Tested on a throttled connectionYour office wifi hides everything. Use the browser's network throttling.
• Static assets are cached properlyContent-hashed files should be immutable and long-lived. Serving them with max-age=0 makes every repeat visit revalidate.
• No third-party script you cannot justifyEvery tag manager, chat widget and analytics script is someone else's code on your critical path.

If it is not set up before launch, the launch traffic is gone forever.

• Analytics is installed and receiving dataVerify in the real-time view from a different device.
• Tracking respects consent where it has toIf a cookie banner exists, check that declining actually prevents the scripts from loading.
• The conversions that matter are trackedForm submissions, calls, purchases. Traffic numbers without conversions cannot answer any question worth asking.
• The site is registered with a search consoleIt is how you find out about indexing problems before the client does.

The pages nobody designs, which everybody eventually sees.

• The 404 page is designed and offers a way backVisit a made-up URL and see what happens.
• Empty states say something usefulA search with no results, a category with no items, a feed with no posts.
• Long content does not break the layoutA very long product name, a customer with a hyphenated surname, a paragraph where a sentence was expected.
• Slow or failed loads are handled visiblySomething should indicate loading, and something should say so when it fails.
• The back button behavesEspecially after a form submission or a filter change.