Final Validation
This is your "ship it" gate. You validate that performance improved without breaking UX, caching correctness, SEO, or tracking.
Functional Checks
Core flows
- Homepage renders correctly.
- Mobile menu opens and closes.
- Forms submit (and confirmation emails/redirects work).
- Search and pagination work.
- Login works.
- Ecommerce: cart and checkout work (if applicable).
Visual Stability Checks
CLS/FOUC/font behavior
- No visible layout jumps during load.
- No flash of unstyled content (FOUC).
- Text is visible while fonts load (swap behavior).
- Hero media is sized correctly (no popping).
Performance Checks
- Run Lighthouse on a few representative templates.
- Run a WebPageTest waterfall for the slowest/highest-value page.
- Confirm the LCP element is being prioritized.
Cache and CDN Checks
Check cache-related headers
curl -sI https://example.com/ | grep -iE 'x-litespeed-cache|cf-cache-status|cache-control|alt-svc'
Validate:
- public pages: cache hits after warm-up
- login/admin/checkout: bypass
Tracking and SEO Checks
- Verify analytics/tag manager events still fire (as intended).
- Confirm canonical/meta tags and structured data are intact.
Checklist
- Critical flows verified.
- No visible regressions (CLS/FOUC).
- Performance tested on representative templates.
- Cache headers validated on public and dynamic routes.
- Tracking and SEO sanity checked.