Does it work
- Send a real enquiry through the form and confirm it arrives in the inbox a human reads. Check the spam folder. A form that reports success but delivers nowhere is the most expensive bug in this business.
- Submit it wrong on purpose. Empty, a bad email address, a name with an apostrophe. The errors should be clear and should not wipe what was typed.
- Click every link. Including the footer, including the ones in the small print. Broken internal links are the commonest defect on a new site.
- Visit a page that does not exist and make sure you get a real 404 page with a way back, not a blank screen or an accidental copy of the homepage.
- Check old URLs redirect if you replaced an existing site. Every address that used to work should land somewhere sensible.
Does it work for everyone
On a real phone
Not just a narrow browser window. Nothing should scroll sideways, and every button should be comfortably tappable.
By keyboard alone
Tab through the page. You should always be able to see where you are, and reach every control.
With enough contrast
Pale grey on white fails a lot of readers, including you in ten years. There are free contrast checkers; use one on your body text.
With images described
Every meaningful image needs alt text. Decorative ones get empty alt text rather than a description of the gradient.
Can it be found
- Every page has its own title and description — not the same one repeated across the site.
- One h1 per page, headings in order, and no heading chosen because it was the right size.
- A sitemap that lists the pages you want indexed, and a robots file that points at it.
- The "coming soon" block removed and no leftover instruction telling search engines to ignore the site. This one catches people out embarrassingly often.
- The certificate valid, and the version people type — with or without www — landing on the same place rather than both existing separately.
Is it true
The part no script can decide for you, and the part that matters most. Every claim on the page should be one you could defend to the customer it persuaded.
- No invented review counts, client numbers, years in business or awards.
- Testimonials only from people who actually said those words.
- Prices that match what you will actually charge, and what your quotes say.
- No stock photo presented as your premises, your team or your work.
- Licences, insurance and credentials stated accurately or not at all.
An automated check catches the obvious inventions. It cannot catch a plausible lie, and a plausible lie is what a language model will hand you if you let it write your homepage unsupervised. Read every claim yourself, once, slowly, before it goes live.
The week after
Launch is a start, not an ending. In the first week: check the site is actually reachable from somewhere that is not your own machine and your own network, confirm at least one real enquiry has arrived, and write down the date so you have a baseline for every comparison you make later.
Then leave it alone for a while. Changing things weekly because nothing has happened yet is how sites lose the ground they were quietly gaining.