Proper website testing isn’t refreshing the homepage and calling it done.
The most rigorous testing I’ve ever done was on Fáilte Ireland’s WAGs, Digital That Delivers and Just Transition programmes – high-stakes, high-visibility public sector sites, where “looks fine to me” isn’t a standard anyone can afford to work to. That’s the level this post is pulled from.
The Toolkit
Before the process, the tools that actually do the checking:
- Browser dev tools: the first stop for almost everything, from layout bugs to console errors.
- Google Analytics: comparing traffic and behaviour across different time periods to see what’s actually changed on a site, not just what looks different on the surface.
- Lighthouse: quick, honest performance and best-practice scoring.
- Deque Axe Monitor: accessibility issues that a visual check alone won’t catch.
- BrowserStack and real devices: because emulators don’t always tell the full story, and cross-browser/cross-device is still where things quietly break.
- A screen reader (VoiceOver/NVDA): the only way to actually know if a site works the way it needs to for someone using one.
- GTmetrix: speed testing, though not the whole story (more on that below).
- SERanking.com and Screaming Frog: SEO health, crawl errors, broken links, redirect chains, etc.
The Audit
Every project starts here, before anything gets touched.
The audit is a summary document of what’s actually there on the current website: what’s obvious in terms of design, layout, navigation and flow. What’s broken or looks outdated. Whether the content actually works and reads well. Then device testing, a speed test, an SEO check and an accessibility pass.
This becomes the baseline, the list everything else gets measured against.
Design & Development
Testing doesn’t wait until the end. Through design and development, it’s design reviews with feedback meetings to catch things like inconsistent spacing, unclear calls to action, or a layout that breaks the moment it hits tablet, long before the website goes live. Fixing something at this stage takes minutes. Fixing it after launch takes a lot more time, and a lot more money.
Pre-Launch
This looks a lot like the audit again, deliberately. Same lens, same checks: design, layout, navigation, flow, devices, speed, SEO, accessibility… except now the question is whether everything flagged at the start actually got addressed properly, and whether anything new got introduced along the way.
It’s also the last real chance to catch anything small before it goes live: a form that doesn’t submit properly, a broken link, placeholder text that never got swapped out, a redirect that was never set up. Nothing dramatic on its own, but exactly the kind of thing that’s much harder to explain away once a client’s customers are already looking at it.
Post-Launch
A project completion report, confirming everything above and the original brief have been followed 100%.
Nothing gets approved until every item on that list passes; if it’s not 100%, it doesn’t get signed off.
Not “it’s live!”, but proof that it’s live and it’s right, in excruciating detail. This may sound like the most boring part, but it’s my favourite! There’s nothing better than a nicely organised, perfectly formatted 10-15 page report.
The One Thing That Nearly Always Gets Missed
Speed testing is the one aspect people get wrong most often, and it’s an easy trap.
Run a site through GTmetrix on high-powered broadband, and it’ll usually look great. But that’s not how most people actually experience the internet: a huge chunk of real users are on mobile data, often not great mobile data, and that’s the condition that actually matters.
Test under those conditions instead and the picture changes. More often than not, it means going back to the developer for another round of optimisation, because “fast on my office wifi” and “fast on someone’s phone in the countryside” are two very different things, and only one of them is the real test.
Why It Matters
None of this is exciting work… for you maybe, but it is for me. It’s also the difference between a site that looks finished and one that actually is.
The sites I end up judging on my daily browsing are, almost without exception, the ones that skipped a step somewhere in this list.
