The page looks finished. That's the problem—looking finished and being finished are different. This is a route-by-route audit for the awkward stuff that hides behind a polished homepage.

Routes and navigation

  • •Inventory every route. List them. Yes, all of them.
  • •Check navigation and logo links. Does the logo go home? Do nav items go to real pages?
  • •Find empty href values and "#" placeholders. An href set to "#" is a button pretending to be a link.

Buttons and forms

  • •Click every button. Does it do something? Buttons with no action are common.
  • •Submit every form. Check success and error states—not just the happy path.
  • •Confirm contact destinations. Does the form actually reach a person?

Links and media

  • •Check social links. Do they go to real profiles, not placeholder handles?
  • •Look for missing images (broken icons, alt text showing as text).
  • •Verify alt text is descriptive, not "image" or the filename.

Accessibility

  • •Tab through the site. Can you reach everything with a keyboard?
  • •Are focus indicators visible? If you can't see where you are, neither can your visitors.
  • •Check heading hierarchy. One H1, then logical H2 and H3. Don't skip levels.

Mobile and menus

  • •Open the mobile menu. Does it open, close, and navigate?
  • •Check sticky headers and bottom navigation for overlap.

The sneaky stuff

  • •Open the console. Errors and warnings count.
  • •Check redirects. Do old URLs go where they should?
  • •Look for draft content accidentally exposed—unpublished pages reachable by URL.
  • •Search for test users, fake content, and placeholder URLs (example.com, test@example.com).
  • •Search the rendered text for localhost, staging domains, [LOCAL TEST], "coming soon," and internal notes.

Auth and admin

  • •Confirm authentication behaves: logged-out users see what they should, logged-in see what they should.
  • •Make sure administrator access isn't accidentally public.

Intentional vs. accidental placeholders

Some "coming soon" content is intentional—a page you genuinely haven't built, clearly labeled. That's fine. The danger is accidental placeholders: a real-looking page that still says "Lorem ipsum" or links to a staging server. Know which is which before you ship.

Final route-by-route checklist

For each route: does it load, does its content match its purpose, do its links and forms work, does it work on mobile, and is anything leaking that shouldn't be?

Takeaway

Audits aren't glamorous, but they're cheaper than a launch-day email about a button that goes nowhere.