Process guide
The website QA process: a step-by-step workflow for every release
A practical website QA process: define scope, test in staging, review visually across devices and languages, sign off, release and monitor production.
A website QA process turns ad-hoc checking into a repeatable routine. The steps below work for a small marketing site and scale to multilingual sites with hundreds of templates.
1. Define scope and inventory
List the pages and templates affected by the release, plus the critical paths that must always work. Use a sitemap or crawl to make sure nothing is missing.
2. Capture a baseline before changes
Capture the current production pages before the release. Without a baseline, reviewers cannot tell what changed — only what is there now.
3. Test in staging
Run functional checks on forms and flows, then capture staging across viewports and languages and compare against the baseline. Classify each difference as expected, a bug, or noise.
- Functional flows and forms
- Visual comparison vs baseline
- Content and translations
- SEO metadata and links
4. Fix, retest and sign off
Log bugs with screenshots and the URL, viewport and language where they appear. Retest fixes against the same configuration. Sign off only when agreed criteria are met.
5. Release and verify production
Immediately after release, capture production and compare with staging. Caching, CDNs, environment variables and third-party scripts often behave differently in production.
6. Monitor continuously
Schedule recurring captures of critical pages so later CMS edits, expired assets and third-party changes are caught between releases.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
Who should own website QA?
A named QA owner coordinates, but developers, content editors and localization reviewers each verify their part.
How long should website QA take?
It depends on scope. Automating capture and comparison shortens it most, because review then focuses only on what changed.
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