Welcome to Field Guide, our Wednesday series of practical, step-by-step QA for real websites. We're starting with the checklist we wish everyone ran before hitting publish.
Most launch-day bugs aren't subtle. A form that doesn't send. A menu that won't open on a phone. A "Buy now" button that links to staging. They slip through because nobody looked, not because they were hard to find.
Here's a checklist that takes about 30 minutes and catches most of them. Set a timer and go.
Minutes 0–5: Forms and money
These are the bugs that cost you directly, so they go first.
- Submit every form on the site with real-looking data. Confirm the email or entry actually arrives where it should.
- Submit each form with something wrong: an empty required field, an invalid email. Check that the error message makes sense.
- If you sell anything, run a test purchase from product page to confirmation. Check the confirmation email too.
- Try pasting into fields instead of typing. Autofill and paste break more forms than you'd expect.
Minutes 5–12: Phone first
More than half your visitors are probably on a phone, so check on an actual phone, not just a narrow desktop window.
- Open the home page and your two most important pages.
- Open and close the menu. Tap every item in it.
- Look for text that overflows its box, images that are cut off, and buttons that are too small to tap.
- Fill out your main form on the phone. The on-screen keyboard often covers the submit button.
- Rotate to landscape once. Something will usually look odd.
Minutes 12–18: Links and navigation
- Click every link in the header and footer.
- Check that links to other sites open where you expect.
- Visit a URL that doesn't exist, like
/this-page-is-missing, and make sure your 404 page looks intentional. - Search for any leftover staging, localhost, or preview URLs. These hide in buttons and logos.
Minutes 18–24: Content and polish
- Read every headline out loud. Typos jump out when you hear them.
- Look for placeholder text: "Lorem ipsum," "Title goes here," "TBD."
- Check that the page title and preview image look right when you paste a link into a chat app.
- Make sure dates, prices, and contact details are current.
Minutes 24–28: The console
You don't need to be a developer for this one. In Chrome, right-click the page, choose Inspect, and open the Console tab. Reload the page.
Red lines are errors. A few from third-party scripts are normal, but if you see errors that mention your own site's files, or anything that says "failed to load," write them down. We'll cover reading these in a later Field Guide.
Minutes 28–30: Second browser
Open the home page in a browser you didn't use above, like Safari if you tested in Chrome. Scroll through once. Layout differences between browsers are less common than they used to be, but they still happen, especially with fonts and forms.
Write it down where it happened
The fastest way to lose a bug is to note it somewhere else and fix it later from memory. As you go, report each issue right on the page where you found it, with the page, device, and what you expected.
If you have FeedbackDots installed, drop a dot on each problem as you find it. The screenshot, URL, device, and console are attached for you, so your 30 minutes go into finding bugs instead of describing them.
Make it a habit
Run the checklist before every launch, and again after any big change. It won't catch everything, but it catches the bugs your visitors would have found first.
Next Wednesday: how to run a client review without forty emails.