Website testing is an important part before making your website live after development and after making your website live. If not tested properly, website can put you back in ways you can’t even imagine.
As said by Christopher Dayagdag – “We don’t just build websites, we build websites that SELLS” many people build websites for the purpose of selling and a website that doesn’t sell does no good to the company. When performing website testing we have to be really careful as after all we are humans and we might slip out on one or two things, however, these things can prove to be of really big pain when escalated on a higher level. Hence there are a lot of things that we need to take care of while testing a website. So, we should not miss out on them while making our website accessible to the majority of the audience out there.
Let’s see what all is there that needs to be taken care of in website testing.
Take care of the following while performing website testing
1. Accessibility Testing
When performing website testing, you need to test for its accessibility keeping a user in mind. Because if your website is not accessible by all sections of the population it becomes really difficult to sell your product or services to all the sections of the population.
By accessibility testing of a website, we mean testing it for everyone which includes the different abled section of the society as well including cross browser accessibility testing as well. Making the website accessible also helps you provide SEO benefits as well. Do you know Google provides SEO benefits to the website which abides by the WCAG guidelines? Not only has this, providing accessibility also improved your website’s reach to about 15% of the total world’s population.
Hence you need to take care of accessibility as well while testing a website.
2. Staging Environment Testing
Well, website testing in your local environment before making it publically accessible is really necessary. We need to test the website first hand ourselves before it becomes publicly available. Though we always make a mistake of testing and configuring only the required fields in our Staging environment and we avoid configuring everything on it. When we move it to production, it affects the whole module hence resulting in errors on Production environment. Hence, it is always advisable to test and configure staging environment properly and then move it to the production environment so there will be no surprises and you don’t have to listen your bugs from your customers.
3. No Last Moment Hurry for Testers!
There are various circumstances under which there are mismanagements among the development team and testing team. Sometimes, development takes a bit longer than expected and clients don’t understand that. When you have to deliver at a deadline, you have to deliver at the deadline. No excuses are generally entertained. And in such case, if development takes a day or two more due to some complications, all the hassle falls upon the testing team. A day or two when decreased from testing team, put on an extreme pressure upon them and in this hassle, the testing team may miss out on the major bugs. This is really an alarming condition! Hence, the last minute hassle should be avoided by keeping a relaxation of 1-2 days when deciding the deadline for your project.
4. Hyperlinks, are you there?
Navigation in a website helps the user to better find his answers and evaluate your website properly. Hyperlinks are crucial in this navigation in a user journey. Every time, the testing team is so focused on functional testing it tends out to miss on hyperlinks!
- Are the hyperlinks relevant or not?
- Are they directing to the right page?
- Are they working properly or not?
- Are they even there or not?
It is also necessary to perform cross browser compatibility testing of your hyperlinks as it has been observed many times that a hyperlink works fine on one browser but fails to load on the other browser.
5. Cross browser testing
As a tester, we often test a website on the browser installed in our local system and forget that not everyone else has the same browser installed in their system. Also, with the increasing number of mobile devices and types, it becomes necessary to test if the website looks and works the same in all browsers and devices. Cross browser testing helps to make sure that the website works exactly the same as expected in all browsers and devices. Hence this is one such thing that needs to be tested in a website. Tools like LambdaTest can help in performing cross browser testing of your website by providing you 2000+ combinations of browsers and devices on cloud to test upon.
6. Is your Website Responsive?
Responsiveness is yet again an important parameter to test in your website. When developing a website, you should take care that 52% of people use mobile phones to access a website. Hence, the website should be responsive on all mobile and tablet devices. You need to test your website’s responsiveness on all majorly used screen sizes. With LambdaTest you can test your website on 44 desktop and mobile devices for responsiveness.
7. How is the Page Loading Speed?
Page loading is one of the main factors in a website. Pages with high loading times are often ignored by google while ranking. So, if you have created a very nice and beautiful website that is working and functioning properly buy takes a lot of time to load, you will need to revisit it and optimize it for loading time. You can use tools like Google Page Speed checker to test your website’s speed on mobile and desktop.
8. Is it a 404?
Four oh four errors can be annoying and when it comes to an important link, they become more irritating. However, everyone understands that the website has a downtime, but it is up to you how you project that to your users.
Custom 404 pages are in trend these days where designers and developers use their creativity to design an amazing 404 page which leaves the user to think how beautiful the actual website will be when it is up!
Also, make sure if in case your website is up and somehow the user lands on 404 page, there should be a way back for the user to return to your homepage.
9. Are the CTAs working fine?
CTAs or Call to Actions are yet another very important part for your website. They are the ones which provoke the users to sign up, make a purchase, check pricing page, visit or test a specific feature, download a book or manual, or anything else you’d like the user to do. Hence, it is very necessary that CTAs are working fine, do not land to some irrelevant page, or don’t throw a 404 for sure!
- Are the CTAs large enough to be noticed?
- Is the text on CTAs readable?
- Does the color contrast of CTAs and website look good?
- Are they appealing to the user?
These are some things that need to be tested thoroughly in your website.
10. Where does the company logo land?
Many times, users get confused and lost in the website’s navigation and the only way out they find is to get back to the homepage. You need to make sure that they have a homepage link in all the pages and there is nothing better than a company logo to provide this homepage link in all pages.
Make sure that the company logo on all pages lands to the homepage, also while testing, take care that not all logos on the page should be clickable as this might lead to confusion again.
11. 100% Automation? NO!
With the introduction of Selenium and Automation testing, many testers thought that they now have to do nothing as the automation will do the task for them and they become excited. However, this is not the case, automation is there to help in manual testing and not to replace manual testing.
Hence, 100% automation of anything is never the ideal case. We always need to use automation as a helping hand to manual testing and not its replacement.
12. How it reacts to heavy traffic?
Before making your website live, or running an offer, or sharing your website on a new platform or introducing your website to a new community, you need to make sure that you’re ready for the heavy traffic that will come to your side. We have seen many examples where the websites are unable to handle heavy traffic and crash. Even we have seen the same in Amazon when their website faced a downtime of 1 hour on a Prime Day. So make sure that your website is ready to handle the traffic that you expect while testing it.
12. Is SSL Certificate valid?
SSL certificate or Secure Sockets Layer certificate is yet another important feature of your website. You need to test your website if its SSL certificate is valid or not. SSL certificate should be renewed from time to time. Also, you need to make sure that HTTP of your website redirects to HTTPs. Sometimes, this causes two different URLs for a website in which one works on HTTP and doesn’t work on other and vice versa.
Well, no testing is 100% testing. Website testing is one such thing the more you do, the more it comes up. No website can be fully tested for bugs as one way or another you’ll find bug when accessing it. However, we can try to give our 100% to it. So, we need to cover all possibilities and use case for website testing to avoid surprise bugs.
Let us know in the comments section below what else you shouldn’t miss while performing your website testing.