How to test your new website before it goes live

Test your new website the way a customer will use it: on a phone, in a hurry, trying to call you or send a message. Before it goes live on your address, tap every phone number, send yourself a message through every form, click every link, read every word out loud and check it loads quickly on a phone. Most problems take a minute to fix before launch and cost you customers after it.

Where and when to test

Test on the preview, the temporary address where the new site sits before your domain points at it. Your designer or website service should give you that address. Testing there means you can find mistakes without customers seeing them.

Set aside an hour with no interruptions. Have a notepad or a document ready, and for every problem write down three things: which page, what is wrong, and what it should say instead. A screenshot helps. One clear list is much easier for whoever fixes it than a dozen texts.

Test on real phones first

Most of your customers will see the site on a phone, so start there, not on your computer.

Use your own phone and someone else's. If you have an iPhone, borrow an Android phone, and the other way round. Try an older or smaller phone if anyone in the family has one.
Hold it upright, then sideways. Nothing should run off the edge or overlap.
Turn up the text size in the phone's settings (Accessibility, then Display and Text Size on an iPhone; Display or Font size on most Android phones). Many of your customers have it turned up. The site should still read cleanly.
Scroll the home page and ask: within the first screen, can I tell what this business does, where, and how to reach it?
Open the menu on every page. Make sure it opens, closes and every item goes where it says.

Tap every phone number and email link

On a phone, tap each phone number on the site. It should open the dialer with the right number, with no missing digit. Check the header, the contact page, the footer and any "Call now" button. They are often typed separately, so one can be wrong while the others are right.

Tap the email links too. They should open a new message to the right address. If you list a text-message number, tap that as well. Making your phone number tappable covers what a good call button looks like.

Send a test through every form

Contact forms fail quietly, so test each one properly:

Fill it in on your phone with real details: your own name and a personal email address you can check.
Write a message you would recognize, like "Test from the contact page, Tuesday morning".
Send it, and look at what you see next. There should be a clear confirmation, not a blank page or an error.
Check your business inbox, and your spam folder. Note how long it took to arrive.
Hit reply on the message you received. The reply should go to the person who filled in the form, not to the website itself.
Try sending the form with the email field empty. It should ask you to fill it in rather than sending a message you cannot answer.

Repeat for every form: contact, quote request, booking request. If a message never arrives, do not launch until it does. Where contact form messages go explains the usual culprits.

Click every link

Go through the site page by page and click everything clickable: menu items, buttons, links in the text, footer links, social media icons, the map, the "Leave us a review" link.

Watch especially for:

Social icons that go to the template's default page, or to Facebook's home page, instead of your page.
Buttons that say "Get a quote" but lead to the home page.
A map pin in the wrong spot, or showing a business with a similar name.
Links that open your old site.
Links to documents (menus, price lists, forms) that no longer exist.

Read every word, out loud

Reading aloud catches what silent reading skips. Check with particular care:

Phone number, address, email address, hours and holiday hours.
License numbers, insurance details and certifications.
Prices, if you list them, and the services you actually offer. Remove any you have stopped.
Town names in your service area, spelled the local way.
Staff names and their roles.
Years: "serving the area since", "over 20 years", the copyright year in the footer.
Leftover sample text. Search each page for words like "Lorem", "Your business", "Sample" or "example.com".

Then ask someone who does not know your business well to find your hours and call you, starting from the home page on their phone. Watch them without helping. Where they hesitate is where the site needs work.

Check the speed

Open PageSpeed Insights, paste the preview address and run it. Look at the mobile result. You do not need to understand every line; look for warnings about large images, which are the most common cause of a slow small-business site. Then just load the site on your phone over mobile data, away from your Wi-Fi. If you find yourself waiting, so will your customers.

Check your old page addresses

If you are replacing an existing site, make a list of its page addresses (the menu pages, plus any page you know customers or Google find). On the new site, each one should either exist at the same address or forward to the matching new page. A missing one means anyone with that old link lands on "page not found" after the switch. Old page addresses and why forwarding them matters explains how this works.

What to do before you approve launch

Test on two different phones, upright and sideways, with large text.
Tap every phone number and email link.
Send a real test through every form and find it in your inbox.
Click every link, button and icon.
Read every page aloud and check every number.
Run the speed check and load the site over mobile data.
Check each old page address.
Send your list of fixes in one message, then test the fixes.

When it all passes, move on to the launch day checklist. And if you are still choosing who builds the new site, you can see your site rebuilt first and run every one of these tests on the preview before you decide.