QA Testing Checklist for Product Launches: What to Test Before You Go Live

Why pre-launch QA is different

Ongoing QA and pre-launch QA have different goals. During development, you test individual features as they are built. Before a launch, you test the complete, integrated product as a real user would experience it, under real-world conditions, across all browsers and devices, with real (or realistic) data.

Pre-launch is also when the stakes are highest. A bug that ships on day one, before you have any user trust, is disproportionately damaging. First impressions of a new product are difficult to recover from.

1. Core user journey testing

Before anything else, walk every critical user journey from start to finish as a real user. For most products, this means:

• Sign-up or account creation flow (including email verification)
• Login and logout (including password reset)
• The primary "value action" of your product: add to cart and checkout, create and save a document, submit a form, book an appointment
• Billing and payment flows if applicable
• Account management: update profile, change password, delete account

Test each journey to completion, not just the happy path. What happens if the email already exists? If the payment fails? If the user goes back mid-flow?

2. Cross-browser and cross-device testing

Your developers likely built and tested on one browser. Users use five.

• Chrome (latest on Windows and Mac)
• Safari (latest on Mac and iOS, they behave differently)
• Firefox (latest)
• Edge (latest)
• Chrome on Android
• Safari on iPhone (different from desktop Safari in surprising ways)

Test at mobile, tablet, and desktop breakpoints. The most common launch day bugs are layouts that look fine on a 1440px MacBook but break on an iPhone 13 screen width.

3. Performance

Run Lighthouse on your key pages before launch. Minimum targets:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) under 2.5 seconds
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) under 0.1
• First Input Delay (FID) under 100ms / Interaction to Next Paint (INP) under 200ms
• Performance score 80+

Core Web Vitals are a Google ranking signal. Poor performance on launch hurts both user experience and SEO from day one.

4. Accessibility

Run an automated accessibility scan on every page. Use axe, Lighthouse, or the RedQA Accessibility Scanner. Fix all Critical and Serious violations before launch. Beyond automated tools:

• Keyboard-navigate through every feature without a mouse
• Check that all images have meaningful alt text
• Check colour contrast on text and interactive elements
• Verify focus indicators are visible throughout

5. Security basics

• HTTPS enforced everywhere, no mixed content
• No sensitive data (tokens, user IDs, emails) in URLs
• Authentication required pages are not accessible when logged out
• Input fields reject unexpected inputs (try XSS payloads in text fields)
• API endpoints return 401/403 for unauthenticated and unauthorised requests
• Error responses do not expose stack traces or server internals

6. Integrations and third-party services

Test every third-party integration end-to-end in the production environment (not staging, which often has sandbox credentials):

• Payment gateway: test with real card numbers in live mode
• Email delivery: trigger every transactional email and verify receipt and formatting
• Analytics: confirm events fire correctly in GA4, Mixpanel, or your analytics tool
• CRM or marketing integrations: verify leads and signups flow through correctly

7. Content and copy review

• No placeholder text ("Lorem ipsum", "TBD", "coming soon") visible to users
• All links are working and point to the right destinations
• Legal pages are in place: Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, Cookie Policy
• Contact information is correct
• Error messages are clear and user-friendly (not developer-facing)

8. Smoke testing on production

After going live, run a brief smoke test on the production environment: log in, complete the core action, receive an email. Things that work on staging sometimes break in production due to environment differences. Catch this within minutes of launch, not hours.

Download our free QA Testing Checklist for a printable version covering functional, accessibility, performance, API, and security test criteria.

Need help with pre-launch testing? RedQA offers scoped pre-launch testing engagements to give you confidence before you go live.

Related reading: What is Exploratory Testing · How to Write a Bug Report