How I Inspect a Web Project Before Sign-Off

In real construction, a building isn’t finished when the last brick is laid. It’s finished when it passes the Réception — the final inspection where the architect walks every room, checks every detail against the plan, and only then signs the handover.

I run my web projects the same way. Before any site of mine is handed over, it goes through an inspection I treat as seriously as the build itself. Here’s the checklist I actually run — not the aspirational version, the real one.

1. Performance: measure, don’t guess

The first pass is never visual. It’s numerical.

• Lighthouse on every template — homepage, every service page, every content type. A site isn’t fast because one page is; it’s fast because all of them are.
• The four scores: Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, SEO. I aim for 100/100 on each. If one dips below 90, it doesn’t ship until I know why.
• Core Web Vitals — LCP, CLS, and INP (the metric that replaced FID). A great Lighthouse score on a clean lab machine tells you one thing; real-world field data tells you another. I check both.

2. Accessibility: keyboard and screen reader

A site that looks beautiful but can’t be operated by everyone isn’t finished — it’s decorated.

• Full keyboard walkthrough. Tab through the entire site. Is there a visible focus ring everywhere? Can every menu, form, and accordion be reached and operated without a mouse?
• Semantic structure. One h1 per page, headings in logical order, real <button> and <nav> elements — not <div>s that pretend to be buttons.
• Contrast. Text over images, text over glass panels — measured, not eyeballed.
• A screen-reader pass. Listen to the site the way a user would, not the way I’d read the code.

3. SEO: the technical foundation

Ranking isn’t luck, and it isn’t content alone. It’s a set of technical conditions that have to be true on every page.

• One canonical URL per page — no duplicate content fighting itself.
• Meta title and description on every page, written for humans, not stuffed with keywords.
• Structured data where it matters (I use BlogPosting on articles, Organization and breadcrumbs elsewhere).
• Clean, descriptive slugs and a sitemap that’s actually correct.
• No broken links. A link to a 404 is a small crack in the building — I walk the site and find them before the client does.

4. The punch list

This is where inspection becomes honest. I keep a running list of every issue found — however small — and I don’t close the file until each one is fixed or deliberately decided against.

A punch list isn’t a sign of a bad project. It’s a sign of a real one. Every building has a list of small things on the day of inspection. What separates a professional from a careless builder is whether the list gets resolved or just acknowledged.

5. The signature

Only when the checklist is clear do I sign. That signature is the whole business model in one act: one mind, one standard, full accountability. There’s no account manager to blame, no team to point at, no “it’s a known issue, we’ll patch it later.” When I sign, I’m saying the building is sound.

Why the inspection is the product

Here’s the thing clients often miss: the inspection isn’t a step at the end of the project. The inspection is the product. Anyone can make a website that looks right on a screenshot. The difference between a site that works and a site that performs is the discipline of checking it against a standard before it’s handed over.

I’d rather deliver late with a clean inspection than deliver on time with a punch list full of excuses. So far, my clients have preferred that trade too.