explaingit

thedaviddias/front-end-checklist

★ 72,631Audience · developerComplexity · 1/5MaintainedLicenseSetup · easy

TLDR

A comprehensive pre-launch checklist for web developers covering HTML, CSS, JavaScript, accessibility, and performance, ensuring nothing critical is forgotten before shipping a website.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((repo))
    What it covers
      HTML head
      CSS best practices
      JavaScript checks
      Accessibility
    Priority levels
      High impact
      Medium recommended
      Low best practice
    How to use it
      Pre-launch verification
      Team onboarding
      Code review reference
    Key sections
      Meta tags
      Web fonts
      Performance
      SEO optimization

Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Run through the checklist before deploying a website to catch missing meta tags, favicons, accessibility features, or performance optimizations.

USE CASE 2

Onboard new front-end developers by walking them through each section to teach web standards and best practices.

USE CASE 3

Review a colleague's code against the checklist items to ensure nothing critical was overlooked during development.

Getting it running

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 5min
Use freely for any purpose, including commercial use, as long as you keep the copyright notice.

In plain English

The Front-End Checklist is a comprehensive reference document for web developers to verify that a website is properly built before launching it to the public. The problem it solves is ensuring nothing important gets forgotten: when building a website there are dozens of technical details that are easy to overlook, like setting the correct character encoding, adding a favicon, configuring meta tags for search engines, ensuring accessibility for screen readers, and optimizing performance. This checklist compiles all of those requirements in one place. The repository is organized into sections covering the HTML document head (meta tags, favicons, canonical links), HTML structure, web fonts, CSS, JavaScript, and accessibility. Each item is labeled with one of three priority levels: high (must not be omitted or the page may break or fail SEO), medium (highly recommended but occasionally skippable), or low (best practice but can be omitted in certain contexts). The items are accompanied by explanations, links to relevant documentation, and links to online tools for testing each requirement. This makes it both a checklist to run through before launch and a learning resource for understanding why each item matters. You would use this repository as a pre-launch quality checklist when shipping a website, as onboarding material for new front-end developers on your team, or as a reference when reviewing someone else's code. It is particularly useful for developers who are building sites without a dedicated QA team. The repository itself is not software; it is documentation written in Markdown and HTML. There is no runtime or framework to install. The companion website and additional checklists (performance and design) are linked from the README.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
I'm about to launch a website. Walk me through the Front-End Checklist and tell me which items are critical for SEO and which are nice-to-have.
Prompt 2
Use the Front-End Checklist to audit my website. Check my HTML head, accessibility attributes, and performance optimizations.
Prompt 3
Create a pre-launch testing plan for my site based on the Front-End Checklist's high-priority items.
Prompt 4
I'm new to web development. Explain what each section of the Front-End Checklist covers and why those items matter.
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Generated 2026-05-18 · Model: sonnet-4-6 · Verify against the repo before relying on details.