- Check for incorrect punctuation marks, particularly apostrophes, quotation marks and hyphens/dashes
- Check headings for where you could potentially use ligatures
- Check for widow/orphan terms in important paragraphs
- Capitalisation (especially of main headings)
- Tense/style of writing
- Recurring/common phrases (e.g. ‘More about X’ links)
- Variations in words (e.g. websites vs web sites, or UK vs US spelling)
- Treatment of bulleted lists (e.g. periods or commas at end of each item)
- Check for hard-coded links to staging domain (i.e. ensure all links will change to the ‘live’ URL/domain when site is launched)
- Ensure no test content on site
- Check how important pages (e.g. content items) print
- For re-designs, ensure important old/existing URLs are redirected to relevant new URLs, if the URL scheme is changing
- Check all ‘hidden copy’ (e.g. alt text, transcriptions, text in JavaScript functions)
- Check web font rendering across major browsers
- Check logos and other key images on retina displays
- Page titles are important; ensure they make sense and have relevant keywords in them
- Create metadata descriptions for important pages
- Check for canonical domain issues (e.g. variations in links to http://site.com http://www.site.com https://www.site.com/ should be reduced to a single consistent style)
- Ensure content is marked-up semantically/correctly (h1, etc.)
- Check for target keyword usage in general content
- Check format (user/search engine friendliness) of URLs
- Set up Analytics, FeedBurner, and any other packages for measuring ongoing success
- Create an XML Sitemap
- Configure Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools
- Ensure conversion tracking is enabled for all PPC campaigns
- Check goals and funnels are correctly setup in analytics tools
- Accessibility
- HTML validation
- JavaScript validation
- CSS validation
- Check all bespoke/complex functionality
- Check search functionality (including relevance of results)
- Check on common variations of browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome etc.), version (6, 7, 2.2, 3.1 etc.) and platform (Windows, OSX, Linux)
- Check on common variations of screen resolution
- Test all forms (e.g. Contact Us, blog comments), including antispam features, response emails/text, etc.
- Configure backup schedule, and test recovery from backup
- Protect any sensitive areas/pages (e.g. administration area)
- Use robots.txt where necessary
- Security/penetration test
- Turn-off verbose error reporting
- Check disk space/capacity
- Set-up email/SMS monitoring/alerts (e.g. for errors, server warnings); consider internal and external monitoring services
- Load test
- Protect any sensitive pages (e.g. administration area)
- Check image optimisation
- Check and implement caching where necessary
- Check total page size/download time
- Minify/compress static (JavaScript/HTML/CSS) files
- Check configuration at every level (web server, database, any other software e.g. Content Management System)
- Check and configure CDN where necessary for distributed caching and load balancing
- Test without JavaScript, Flash, and other plug-ins
- Check all external links are valid
- Social marketing: Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, Facebook, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Submit to search engines
- Set-up PPC/Google AdWords where necessary
- Check formatting of site results in SERPs
- Monitor and respond to feedback (direct feedback, on social media sites, check for chatter through Google, etc.)
- Check analytics for problems, popular pages etc. and adjust as necessary
- Update content