Some time ago, I developed a Web Quality Assurance (QA) checklist (xlsx 18KB) and I have been meaning to share it since.

Quality Assurance is one of those web tasks that is widely ignored. I mean, who wants to check lots of old pages against a series of booorrrring checkpoints, when there is sexy new content to add?!

If Gerry McGovern is right about this—and I think he is—much, much more QA is needed to help reduce the "cult of content volume".

Web Quality Assurance (QA) checklist (XLS 18KB)

Use this spreadsheet to track and manage Quality Assurance (QA) on your website. Feel free to modify this list as you see fit.

QA is utterly fundamental to a good user experience—and your organisational reputation.

Recall the last time you visited a website that had lots of broken links, massive unoptimised images, documents with unintelligible filenames, bloated useless code, etc. It's shameful how it still continues.

Although much QA is now done using sophisticated tools, manual review remains common. Hence this checklist.

Where to start with QA

As well as checking new content for QA, I also recommend reviewing older content in a series of rolling sprints.

Each month, take one of the top content topics (not pages) on your website and prioritise it for attention.

Do that on an ongoing basis and you'll be amazed how things improve over the course of a year.

Download the editable QA checklist

Feel free to re-use or modify this list for your own site. Admittedly, it is somewhat tailored to the site I created it for (and I have sanitised it to remove many custom checkpoints), but it will likely prove useful to build on.

Download the editable Website Quality Assurance checklist (xlsx 18KB).

You can even have fun applying it to my own website and get points for telling me off about the many checkpoints I break myself :(

If you are interested in other useful web management resources, I published a Website Content Calculator a long time ago that you may also find helpful. Try it and other free web management resources on my 'Downloads' page.

We already know that ranking pages across a site based on Views is a very bad idea. But, it's much worse if you use them to decide what content to prioritise for attention.

The reason is that there is no such thing as a "standard" web page. Comparing or prioritising them based on Views just leads to bad decisions.

Web pages are far too varied in length, scope and density for such simplistic analysis.

You can make far better decisions by tracking activity using topics as a new 'Standard Content Set'.

Read the full article "Using topics as a new 'Standard Content Set'".