This is a document that I’ve been updating during the latest years. Obviously It’s not mandatory to meet all the requirements, I just use it as a reference and it helps me to reinforce good practices. Feel free to make suggestions.

Application testing

• Ensure all test are passing
• Stop verbose error reporting, then check 404 and 500 pages

Backups

• Set backup strategy
• Test backups

Load time

• Load test (blitz.io, JMeter…)
• Check number of HTTP requests
• Add expires headers
• Move JS to the bottom
• Compress/minimize js/css
• Check if server it’s serving gzipped content
• Optimize images
• Enable caching
• Check indexes in the database
• Configure CDN

Monitoring

• Server monitoring (Munin, Nagios…)
• Setup web analytics
• Setup Feedburner

Standards

• HTML/JS/CSS validation
• If the site use search, check Opensearch

Design

• Check if the text-to-background contrast is adequate
• Page readability
• Navigation is easy to identify?
• Favicon and mobile icons

Accesibilito

• Accesibility validation
• Images with alt text
• Test different resolutions and font sizes
• Test on mobile devices

Social

• Check Opengraph tags
• Add/test social buttons
• Check social button integration with Google analytics

SEO

• Redirect http://www to http://
• Check meta tags
• Add canonical tag to duplicated content
• Sitemap.xml
• Check url structure
• Create a robots.txt
• Submit to search engines
• Build some backlinks

Legal stuff

• Check terms and conditions
• EU cookie law

Security

• Check HTTPS
• Scan vulnerabilities with an automatic tool
• CSRF token

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