How to test a website: a 7-step checklist

Building a website happens in stages, and there’s plenty of advice on designing, writing and promoting one. Testing gets less attention, yet it’s the step that tells you whether all that work actually comes together.

This guide walks through how to test a website in seven steps. It covers what to check at each step, the free tools that make it quicker, and how to keep testing once the site is live.

Why you need to test a website

Testing confirms that your website works as intended. It proves (or disproves) that your ideas and effort have come together into something functional and useful. If you launch without testing, you’re betting that your visitors will find nothing broken, and they rarely tell you when they do. They just leave.

Testing also makes sure your site works for everyone: on slow connections and fast ones, on phones and desktops, and for people who use a keyboard or a screen reader instead of a mouse.

The checklist at a glance

How to test a website in 7 steps

Step 1: Functionality testing

Functionality testing makes sure the basic parts of your site work. You’re looking for errors, broken links and anything that fails when someone tries to use it. Do this first, so that problems you find in later steps aren’t caused by something simply being broken.

What to check

• Links. Every link should go where it’s supposed to, including your menus, footer and buttons. A link checker crawls the whole site for you and lists every broken one.
• Forms. Submit every form with good data, bad data and no data. Check that errors are clear, that success messages appear, and that the emails or records actually arrive.
• Key journeys. Go through the paths that matter most to your business from start to finish, such as signing up, booking or buying.
• Error pages. Visit a page that doesn’t exist and check that your 404 page helps people find their way back.
• Cookies and consent. Check that your cookie banner works and that the site behaves correctly when someone declines.

If your site changes often, automate the key journeys. Tools such as Playwright and Cypress can click through your site and alert you when something breaks, and AI coding assistants can now write a first version of those tests from a plain-English description.

Step 2: Usability testing

Usability testing checks how easily real people can use your site. It goes beyond whether things work, and asks whether people understand them. Can visitors find what they came for in a few clicks? Are the labels and instructions clear? Does the page make sense at a glance?

Your testers should resemble your audience. You won’t learn much if students test a website built for retirees.

What to check

• Navigation: people can find the content they want quickly, and menus are clear and organised
• Content: text is clear, readable and free of mistakes, and instructions are simple to follow
• Overall experience: what feels unnecessary, what confuses people, and how they feel when they’re done

You don’t need a lab. Give five people a few realistic tasks, such as “find the price of the basic plan”, and watch them try without helping. Five testers usually reveal most of the big problems.

Step 3: Compatibility testing

Compatibility testing checks that your site works across browsers, operating systems and screen sizes. Every combination displays your site slightly differently, and more than half of all web traffic now comes from phones.

What to check

• Browsers: Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox, on both desktop and mobile. Safari on iPhone deserves special attention, because it often behaves differently.
• Screen sizes: use your browser’s device mode to check small phones, large phones, tablets and wide desktop screens. Look for text that’s too small, buttons too close together, and content that scrolls sideways.
• Real devices: emulators are good for layout, but test your key journeys on at least one real iPhone and one real Android phone. If you need many combinations, cloud testing services such as BrowserStack rent you real devices by the hour.

Step 4: Performance testing

Performance testing checks how quickly and reliably your site responds. Slow pages lose visitors, and Google uses page experience as one of its ranking signals.

What to check

Start with PageSpeed Insights. It measures Google’s Core Web Vitals:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how quickly the main content appears. Aim for under 2.5 seconds.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): how quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks. Aim for under 200 milliseconds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): how much the page jumps around while it loads. Aim for under 0.1.

Large images, too many third-party scripts and slow hosting are the usual causes of poor scores.

If you expect traffic spikes, such as a launch, a sale or a campaign, also run a load test. Tools such as k6 simulate many visitors at once, so you can find your site’s breaking point before your customers do.

Step 5: Accessibility testing

Accessibility testing checks that people with disabilities can use your site, including people who are blind, have low vision, or can’t use a mouse. It’s the right thing to do, and in many places it’s also the law. The European Accessibility Act, for example, has applied to many websites selling to EU customers since June 2025. The usual standard to test against is WCAG 2.2, level AA.

What to check

• Run an automated checker such as WAVE or axe on your main pages. These catch missing image descriptions, poor colour contrast and unlabelled form fields.
• Put the mouse away and use the site with only the keyboard. You should be able to reach and use everything with Tab and Enter, and always see where you are.
• Try a screen reader (VoiceOver on Mac and iPhone, or NVDA on Windows) on a key page.
• Zoom the page to 200% and check that nothing breaks or overlaps.

Automated checkers find only some problems, so the manual checks matter.

Step 6: Security and launch basics

Before launch, run through the basics that are easy to forget:

• The whole site loads over HTTPS, with no browser warnings
• Forms are protected from spam, and they don’t expose personal data
• Software, plugins and themes are up to date, and admin accounts use strong passwords and two-factor authentication
• Backups are running, and you’ve checked that you can restore one
• Every page has a sensible title and description, and your staging site is hidden from search engines while the live one isn’t
• Analytics is recording visits, and your site is set up in Google Search Console

Step 7: Collect feedback from testers and real visitors

However careful you are, you’ll miss things. Your testers and your first visitors will use your site in ways you didn’t expect, on devices you didn’t test.

The quickest way to hear about it is a feedback button. Add one during testing, so your testers can report problems from the exact page where they found them, and keep it after launch, so real visitors can do the same.

A good feedback tool attaches a screenshot along with the visitor’s browser, operating system and any JavaScript errors. That means you can see and reproduce the problem without a long email exchange. Our guide to collecting website feedback covers how to get the most from it.

Testing a website is an ongoing process

You aren’t finished when you’ve worked through these seven steps. Browsers update, plugins change, content gets edited, and every change can break something.

Re-run the quick checks after every significant change, run automated tests on your key journeys, check Core Web Vitals in Search Console every month, and keep a feedback button on the site so visitors can tell you when something goes wrong.

Try Saber Feedback free

Saber Feedback adds a feedback button to your website or web app, so testers and visitors can report typos, broken links and bugs from the page they’re on. Each report includes a screenshot, the browser and operating system, and any JavaScript errors, and it can go straight into Jira, Trello, Slack, GitHub and more.

The 30-day free trial includes every feature and needs no credit card. Start your free trial or see pricing.