Website and Content Checklist
Quarterly QA pass a marketing team runs across a public-facing website covering browser compatibility, content freshness, on-page SEO, WCAG accessibility, and Core Web Vitals performance. Run by the web manager with content, SEO, and design contributors.
General Site Health
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Test rendering across current browsers
Run BrowserStack or LambdaTest against the current major versions of Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge. Capture screenshots of the homepage, primary product page, and the highest-traffic blog post — those are the pages where rendering regressions actually cost conversions.
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QA the mobile and tablet layouts
Test on real devices via BrowserStack or in Chrome DevTools device mode at iPhone, Pixel, and iPad widths. Watch for tap targets under 44px, hero text overflowing the viewport, and sticky CTAs covering form submit buttons.
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Verify SSL certificate and HTTPS coverage
Confirm the certificate isn't within 30 days of expiration, that HTTP redirects to HTTPS sitewide, and that no pages serve mixed content. SSL Labs grade should be A or better.
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Confirm consent banner gates marketing tags
Load the site in an incognito window from an EU IP via VPN. Meta Pixel, GA4, and LinkedIn Insight should not fire before the OneTrust or Cookiebot prompt is accepted. Tag-management gating via consent state is the correct pattern; pre-consent firing is a GDPR violation.
Content Quality
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Audit pricing, claims, and product facts
Walk pricing pages, comparison pages, and the homepage hero against the current product source of truth. Comparative claims ("2x faster than competitor X") need a substantiation file under the Lanham Act — flag any claim without one.
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Spot-check brand voice across new pages
Pull the 10 most recently published or updated pages and read them against the messaging house and tone-of-voice doc. Common drift: marketing-speak creeping into product pages, inconsistent capitalization on feature names.
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Review hero imagery and video assets
Verify each hero image and embedded video has a current license on file in the DAM (Bynder, Brandfolder, or Frontify). Check that customer-photo permissions haven't expired and that any AI-generated imagery is disclosed per current FTC guidance.
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Crawl for broken links and redirect chains
Run Screaming Frog against the production sitemap. Flag every 404 and 500, plus any 301 chain longer than two hops. Note that internal links pointing to deprecated /blog/ slugs are the most common source of chains after a content migration.
Collects number Collects file
On-Page SEO
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Check title tags and meta descriptions
Title tags 50–60 characters, meta descriptions 140–160. Pull the Ahrefs or Semrush site audit and sort by missing or duplicate titles. Templated descriptions on category pages are the usual offenders.
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Validate structured data with Rich Results Test
Run Google's Rich Results Test on the homepage, a product page, a blog post, and any FAQ page. Article, Product, FAQPage, and Organization schema should validate without errors. Warnings are acceptable; errors block rich snippets.
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Review GSC coverage and indexing
In Google Search Console, open the Pages report and review Excluded reasons: noindex, canonical issues, soft 404s, crawled-not-indexed. Cross-check sitemap.xml submission status and confirm robots.txt isn't blocking anything launched in the last quarter.
Collects list -
File a reindex request for fixed pages
For each page corrected during this audit, submit a URL Inspection reindex request in GSC. Batch submissions over 10 URLs should go via an updated sitemap rather than one-by-one inspection requests.
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Audit canonical and hreflang tags
Self-referencing canonicals on every indexable URL; no canonical pointing to a redirected target. If the site runs international variants, hreflang must be reciprocal — Screaming Frog's hreflang report flags missing return tags.
Accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA)
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Run axe DevTools on key templates
Scan homepage, product page, blog post, pricing, and contact form templates with axe DevTools or WAVE. Document every Level A and AA violation with screenshot and selector. ADA Title III claims target sites with documented violations the operator could have caught.
Collects number Collects file -
Verify alt text on content images
Decorative images get empty alt (alt=""); content images need descriptive alt that conveys meaning. CMS uploads from the last quarter are usually the gap — reviewers paste images without filling the alt field.
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Test keyboard-only navigation
Tab through the homepage, the primary nav, and the contact form using only the keyboard. Focus indicators must be visible at every stop. Skip-link should appear on first tab. Modal dialogs must trap focus and return it on close.
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Check color contrast on text and CTAs
Body text needs 4.5:1 contrast against background; large text and UI components need 3:1. White text on the brand teal is the most common failure point — verify with the Stark Figma plugin or WebAIM contrast checker.
Performance and Core Web Vitals
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Pull Core Web Vitals from CrUX
Open the Core Web Vitals report in GSC for field data over the trailing 28 days. Targets: LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms, CLS under 0.1, on the 75th percentile across mobile. Lab data from PageSpeed Insights does not substitute for CrUX field data.
Collects list -
Open performance ticket for engineering
For each URL group flagged Poor, file a Jira ticket with the offending metric, the suspected cause (oversized hero image, render-blocking script, layout shift from late-loading ad slot), and a Lighthouse trace attachment.
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Verify CDN caching and image compression
Confirm Cloudflare or Fastly is serving static assets with long cache-control headers and that hero images are WebP or AVIF, not unoptimized PNG. Check that next-gen formats are served via picture/srcset fallback for older Safari versions.
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Audit third-party scripts and tag bloat
Open GTM and remove any tag that hasn't fired in 90 days. Chat widgets, abandoned A/B test scripts, and old retargeting pixels accumulate and harm INP. Target a third-party JS budget under 200KB compressed.
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Sign off on the audit report
Compile findings into the quarterly audit doc, file remediation tickets, and route to the marketing director for sign-off. Tickets without an owner and a target sprint don't get fixed before the next audit.
Collects list Collects signature Collects file
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