The 20 minute check I run on every website before launch

Launch day has a way of making people stop looking. The design's signed off, the content's in, everyone's tired. Which is exactly when the broken contact form and the three megabyte hero image slip through.

This is the check I run on every site before it goes live. It takes about twenty minutes. Use it on yours.

Speed

Run the homepage and one inner page through PageSpeed Insights. I'm looking for green across the board on mobile, not just desktop. The sites I host score at least 85 for performance and 100 for accessibility, best practices and SEO, and that’s the bar. If it's not there, it's almost always images or scripts, and both are fixable in an hour.

Then load it on a phone, on mobile data, not WiFi. Numbers are one thing. Feeling it is another.

Images

Every image sized for where it's shown, served in a modern format, with proper alt text. No camera originals. No decorative images with alt text that says "image". The biggest single speed win on most sites is in this paragraph.

Accessibility

Tab through the whole site with the keyboard. Can you reach everything? Can you see where you are? Check contrast on every text colour, especially the light grey "subtle" ones designers love. Make sure headings are in order, forms have labels, and the menu works with a screen reader. This isn't a nice to have. It's a legal expectation and, more to the point, it's whether people can use the thing.

Search basics

A title and description on every page, written for a human. One H1 per page. Clean addresses. A sitemap, a robots file, and structured data for what the site is (a business, a shop, a person). Open Graph images so links look right when shared. None of this is "SEO". It's just not hiding.

Forms

Submit every form. Check the email arrives, from a sensible address, and isn't in spam. Check what the visitor sees afterwards. Test the validation with bad input. A contact form that silently fails is the most expensive bug a small business website can have.

Security and housekeeping

HTTPS everywhere, no mixed content warnings. Admin accounts with two factor on. Default usernames gone. Backups running, and restored once to prove they work. The 404 page designed, not the server default. Analytics in, cookie compliance sorted. Favicon, because the browser tab is the first thing people see.

Content

Read every page aloud. You'll find the typos, the placeholder paragraph someone forgot, and the sentence that made sense in the brief but not on the page.

Then launch

If it passes all that, it's ready. If it doesn't, it's not, and launching on the agreed date with a broken form helps nobody.

The sites I build go through this, then they're hosted where I can keep an eye on them. If you'd like someone to run it on yours, send me the address.