How web agencies should handle QA for client sites

Most web agencies have no formal QA process. QA happens informally — a developer clicks around before handing off, the project manager checks the homepage looks right, and the site goes live. Issues get found by clients.

This is fixable with a simple, repeatable process.

The agency QA problem

Agencies face a specific challenge: they manage many client sites simultaneously, each with different tech stacks, content, and stakeholders. A manual QA checklist that takes 2 hours per site does not scale. But shipping broken sites is worse — it damages the client relationship and creates expensive post-launch support work.

The goal is a process that is fast enough to run on every project and thorough enough to catch real issues.

Pre-launch QA

Before any site goes live, run a full automated scan. This catches broken links, missing images, console errors, SEO gaps, and security issues in under 60 seconds. Pair it with a manual check of key user flows — checkout, contact form, navigation — that automated tools cannot verify.

Document the scan result and share it with the client. A QA report with a score and a list of resolved issues is a concrete deliverable that demonstrates professionalism.

Post-launch monitoring

After launch, set up weekly automated scans on the production URL. Client sites break after launch for many reasons — content updates, plugin conflicts, expired SSL certificates, external dependencies going offline. Weekly scans catch these before clients do.

Configure email alerts so that when a new critical issue appears, you know about it immediately. Addressing issues proactively — before the client notices — is the difference between an agency that clients trust and one they replace.

Reporting to clients

Scan results make great monthly report content. A QA score improving from 71 to 89 over three months is a concrete metric that justifies a retainer. Most agencies struggle to quantify the value of ongoing work — QA scores give you a number to point to.

Making it repeatable

The key is making QA part of the workflow, not an afterthought. Add a QA scan to your project checklist as a required step before any launch. Create a project in Lintry for every client site. Set weekly monitoring on every active client. The marginal cost of adding a new client to your QA workflow should be near zero.