The Internet is where all businesses go to compete, and it is the tool that can differentiate one business from another. Most customers, who are looking for a particular product, search the internet for solutions and they make decisions after finding the information on the internet. Your online presence, your website, is the way you stay in the market and communicate with your desired audience. But, it’s not enough to ‘have a website’ in this day and age, you must have a website that is informative, accessible, and user-friendly. So, how can you be sure that your website ticks all of these boxes? You have to test it.
What does the process of testing look like?
Testing is an absolutely vital stage in any website development project; it can’t be ignored. Why? Because users get angry if they experience problems with a website, and it usually results in losing them as a customer, plus it can have a knock-on effect on your reputation. Mistakes can lead to a waste of time and money, and who wants that?
A tester can save the day by performing a series of tests that can eliminate these downfalls. For example, a tester can check the life and validity of a website, its usability across platforms and browsers, and they can check out any potential problems that might arise, like slow loading times.
What exactly has to be checked by a tester to make sure a website runs as smooth as possible?
1) Test a website for mobile-friendliness. The number of people who view websites on their smartphones rather than desktop computers is growing each day. The latest data shows that 53.3% of people access the internet via their mobile phones (source: BroadBand Search (2020)).
Therefore, making a website mobile friendly is of primary importance for e-commerce, online businesses, and for anyone who shares content on the internet. Checking the mobile-friendliness of your website involves; testing its responsiveness, checking out the fonts you’ve decided to use, seeing how images that have been compressed look, enabling the “switch to desktop view” button, and ensuring that buttons are big enough for a smartphone.
2) Cross-browser compatibility. The website you are testing must function across different internet browsers. If you search for the most popular browsers, you’ll see that the leading ones are; Google Chrome, Explorer, Firefox, Netscape, Safari, and Yandex, but there are many others available, in fact – more than 60.
What’s the problem for website developers? Every browser uses a different engine which is responsible for loading and processing data. So, the task of a tester is to adapt the website for a particular engine. There is a list of tricks (and testers know them) that help websites to work well whatever the browser.
3) The loading speed of a website. The loading speed of a website is an important ranking factor, and it also impacts on how a website is perceived by the users. If a website is loading slowly, it is bad for both the search engine and the users. Making sure websites load in a timely manner is an essential part of a testers job and this item on our list needs thorough attention.
Amazon experts, for example, have found that their sales are reduced by 1% when the download speed of their website drops by 100 milliseconds.
Slow websites use more hosting resources, which means additional costs. There are however a number of tools that can help to test the loading speed of a website and they are available on the web. Testers should test out the loading speed of a website as soon as possible.
4) Website validation. The final stage of website testing is to test its validation. Are there any syntax errors? Is the code correct? And how about the tags? Website validation allows testers to monitor the display of the website across different browsers. It means checking the HTML code of a web resource for errors and to ensure there is compliance with the established standards. Getting positive results from testing means that the work on the website has been performed well.
Conclusion
Testing plays a vital role in the development of a high-quality website. After testing, the customer receives a finished project without errors, and the website should be readable, convenient, and reliable for both developers and users around the world.
The more complex a website is, the longer it will take to check it.
Use our tester’s checklist to make sure that your website is simple, user-friendly, and helpful.
