Quality assurance is the process of ensuring that no mistakes end up or stay on a website. Problems like broken interface elements, typos, unintended formatting, or long loading times can negatively impact the user’s perception that your site is professional or authoritative.
Good Quality Assurance
- Involves checking the impact of every change you make to a site.
- Is having a list of issues you check every time you launch a site, change a site, or post content.
- Requires checking changes to a site design in different browsers on different devices
Bad Quality Assurance
- Is impatient
- Leaves broken elements on a site for long periods of time
- Leaves things on a site unfinished
Quality Assurance Concerns
QA list
The best recommendation here is creating a list of things you check every time you make design changes or publish to a site. There can be dozens of small issues to check for and it’s best not to assume you will remember them all.
Typos
Basic editing is essential. Typos can cost you authority in the eyes of users. They imply a lack of attention to detail and can leave you looking less professional than other sites.
Errors
A very common error is to leave an extra opening or closing HTML tag in your content that breaks the footer of your site. Also common are changes to the site that don’t work on all screen sizes. Every change to a site should be carefully reviewed to prevent making users think a site isn’t well maintained.
Browser testing
While browsers are now more alike than every before, there are still small differences between them. And the appearance and behaviors of a site can be very different based on screen size. Before launch and after any design change its essential to look at a site in different browsers and on different screen sizes.
User testing
Do changes to a site help or hurt it? There are many ways, both technical and casual to test the impact of changes to your site. Does a change cause time-on-site to go up or down? Does a change hurt the search rank?
No coming soon
Don’t have any pages, posts, or elements on your site that say “coming soon.” No matter the intent or urgency these elements will most often remain this way for an extended period of time and don’t feel relevant or credible to a visitor.