These are the things I would normally look out before before taking any website to live or production. The checklist may vary to others as it is dependent on your scope but this checklist is meant for Enterprise grade sites.
You might want to consider using a Desktop device to view the following table.
| No | Checklist Item | Description | Phase |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | Website Copyright | Check and ensure that there are no copyright infringement with regards to assets, copy, video, plugin licenses etc. | Build |
| 2. | SEO & Meta Tagging | Page Title and Page Description in meta should be meaningful and relevant. | Build |
| 3. | ALT Text | ALT text should be properly defined for images. This will assist with Image search on Google. This is a good WCAG and SEO practice. Ensure decorative elements do have ALT tags but you should leverage on Role attribute wherever possible. | Build |
| 4. | Friendly URLs | Ensure that the site has friendly URLs rather than a weird URLs like e.g. www.example.com/?page=WaDERffvBTyBYwSAFE0312. This will help improve the site SEO as well. | Build |
| 5. | Redirection URL | It is important that an existing site has the URL migrated over to the new site URL. This can be a 301 or 302 redirect. | Build |
| 6. | No Crawl Zone | Ensure that no crawl zones are defined in the sitemap so that it does not get crawled by Search Engines, especially for Backend/Administration Pages. | Build |
| 7. | Security Scan | Conduct security vulnerability scans and penetration testing. Depending on the nature of your business, you will need to adjust the frequency of this scan. | Test |
| 8. | Page Load Performance Testing | Test the page load performance of website. Ideally, this should be done early so that improvements and optimisation of the codes can be made. If time is not on your side, test the top 20 pages. You can use the Google Lighthouse tool found baked in your Chrome browser. | Build |
| 9. | Minifying Scripts | Check that the scripts are minified so that it would help with the page load time and performance. | Build |
| 10. | Install Analytics and Tag Manager | The site should have analytics tool installed unless they are bound by GDPR regulation. If they need to comply to GDPR laws, seek the client’s permission in black and white. Otherwise, just inform the client that you will be installing analytics and tag manager. | Build |
| 11. | Search Console Installation | Install the Search Console on the site so that you can monitor the traffic after the site is launched. Search Console will also help you indentify those pages with issues and highlight any structure data that was implemented wrongly. | Go Live |
| 12. | Structured Data Testing | You can use the Structured Data Testing Tool developed by Google here. This will help to ensure that your structured data is implemented correctly before going live. | Build |
| 13. | OpenGraph Testing | As social media gains popularity, you may want to consider using OpenGraph for your website so that when you share the web link with your customers, it will be accompanied with an image and a nice text title. You can use Facebook OpenGraph Debugger to test for your site OpenGraph data. | Build |
| 14. | SSL Certificate | Ensure that SSL certificate is installed on your site correctly and enable the latest TLS protocols. | Go Live |
| 15. | No www | Ensure that with www and without www goes to the same site. Create the necessary and ALIAS, A or CNAME records and set to a lower TTL a few days before going live. | Go Live |
| 16. | Get Affirmation | Get affirmation of Going Live and ensure relevant parties are on standby before the site goes Live. You may consider doing a Deployment and Rollback Plan here. | Before Go Live |
| 17. | WCAG Compliance | Purchase a tool such as SortSite to ensure that you are complying to WCAG standards. Otherwise, you could look at a fine. | Test |
| 18. | Load/Stress or Volume Testing | Depending on the nature and scope, you might need to perform a load/stress or volume testing. This is to ensure that your hardware and network is able to support the traffic especially if the site is a popular site. | Test |
| 19. | CDN Services | Leverage on CDN services so that you site performance is manageable. CDN could also help to increase the page load time taken. | Test |
| 20. | User Feedback | There’s no other better way to know how your site is doing other than getting user feedback. Create a simple form and get users to feedback on any fault they might find on your site. | Go Live |