Our recommendation, up front. We make Proxy Mail QA, so we’re not neutral. This is a plan for checking a whole website, and most of it doesn’t need Proxy Mail QA at all. We recommend it for the steps that depend on an email: signing up, signing in with a code or link, resetting a password, invites, and the confirmations your forms send. For speed, accessibility, links, search and security, we name free tools that aren’t ours. Proxy Mail QA doesn’t judge design or wording, and doesn’t receive SMS.
1. Use it like a visitor (15 minutes)
On your phone first, then a laptop, go through every page as someone who’s never seen the site:
- Can you tell in five seconds what the site is for and what to do next?
- Does every button and link do what it says?
- Does anything look broken, overlap, or sit under the phone’s keyboard?
- Is anything slow enough that you’d give up?
Write down everything, however small. This finds more than any tool.
2. Every form
For each form (contact, newsletter, sign-up, booking, checkout):
- Submit it empty, then with a mistake. Each error should appear at the field, in words.
- Submit it properly. The page should say what happens next.
- If it sends an email (a confirmation, a receipt, a “we’ll be in touch”), check it arrives, reads well and its links work.
Use a new Proxy Mail QA test address for each form, so you can tell which email came from where and none of it reaches your own inbox. Checking marketing emails and unsubscribing as well is possible with Marketing and offer emails switched on in Labs.
3. Accounts, if your site has them
This is where Proxy Mail QA does most of its work:
- Sign up with a new test address. With Proxy Mail QA for Chrome, one click fills the email, name, username, date of birth and password, and the verification code shows in the page when it arrives.
- Verify, then check you’re signed in.
- Sign out and sign in again. The extension offers the test account and its saved password.
- Reset the password, and check the old one stops working.
- Change the email address, if your site allows it, and check both the old and new addresses are told.
- Read each email once in full in the app: the sender, the subject, every link. A link to
localhoston a staging site is flagged.
4. Speed
Run Lighthouse (Chrome DevTools → Lighthouse, on mobile) on your home page and the two pages that matter most, such as pricing and sign-up. Fix the largest items first; they’re usually images. PageSpeed Insights adds real visitors’ data once you have traffic.
5. Accessibility
- Run axe DevTools or WAVE on the same pages.
- Use each page with the keyboard alone: Tab through it, and check you can always see where you are.
- Try a form with a screen reader (VoiceOver on a Mac or iPhone, NVDA on Windows).
Automated tools find some problems, not all. The keyboard and screen reader find the rest.
6. Links and pages
- Run a link checker (the W3C Link Checker, or a crawler such as Screaming Frog) and fix broken links.
- Visit a page that doesn’t exist. Your 404 page should help people back.
7. Search
- Each page has its own title and description.
- Your site is in Google Search Console, with a sitemap submitted.
- Pages you don’t want found (staging, admin) aren’t indexed.
8. Security basics
- Every page loads over HTTPS. Qualys SSL Labs checks the set-up, and Security Headers checks the headers.
- No secret keys in the page’s source or JavaScript.
- Admin pages need a sign-in.
npm auditor Dependabot, if your site has packages.
This isn’t a security test. If your site handles payments or personal data, get one done properly.
9. Trust and legal
- A privacy policy and terms that match what the site actually does.
- A way to contact you.
- A cookie notice, if you use cookies that need one where your visitors are.
10. After launch
- An uptime monitor (UptimeRobot, Better Stack) to tell you when the site is down.
- Error tracking (Sentry), so you see what broke before someone emails you.
Which steps Proxy Mail QA helps with
| Step | Proxy Mail QA? |
|---|---|
| 1. Use it like a visitor | No |
| 2. Every form | Yes, for the emails they send |
| 3. Accounts | Yes: test addresses, the codes and links, saved test passwords, checks on each email |
| 4. Speed, 5. Accessibility, 6. Links, 7. Search | No |
| 8. Security basics | No. It checks how your emails are signed (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), not your site |
| 9. Trust and legal, 10. After launch | No |
Ask your agent to do it
If you build with Qoder, connect Proxy Mail QA from the Qoder Marketplace (or install its plugin, which adds eight skills, among them account-email-audit), then ask:
Check my site at https://staging.acme.dev. Start a Proxy Mail QA run.
1. Trigger every account email the site sends (sign-up verification and its resend,
password reset, sign-in code or link, invite, email change) with new test
addresses, check each with check_email, and list what to fix.
2. Submit the contact form with a new test address and check the confirmation email.
3. Run Lighthouse on mobile for the home, pricing and sign-up pages.
4. Check every internal link.
Finish the run and give me one list, most serious first: things that are broken, then
confusing, then slow.
What to fix first
- Broken: someone can’t sign up, the email doesn’t arrive, a form loses what was typed, a page errors.
- Confusing: people can’t tell what to do next, or an error doesn’t say how to fix it.
- Slow: pages that take more than a few seconds on a phone.
- Everything else.
For the toolkit in one place, see Tools to help build and check my website.