Simply being on the web just doesn’t cut it anymore. In today’s world of high-speed internet connection and ubiquitous mobile devices, users can do more and more on the web with each coming day. This limitless access to digital products and services around the world has made users significantly more demanding towards websites. Whether you’re a small family-run store or a global eCommerce platform, users expect your website to look and run flawlessly. Otherwise, they’ve plenty to choose from.
With the new challenges businesses are facing at the digital frontier, website testing services have become an integral part of a successful launch of any kind of website or web application. In this post, we want to help you understand the importance of thoroughly testing your website before it goes online.
What are the benefits of website testing?
- Minimizing the bugs and errors on the website
- Making your website more user friendly
- Gaining user trust with the website
- Bringing visitors back more often
- Increasing user confidence in your business
- Ensuring compatibility with different platforms
- Drawing more inbound links
- Improving search engine rankings
Website testing checklist
Functional website testing
From search and navigation bars to checkout and contact forms, your website can have a huge variety of features that perform all kinds of different functions to accommodate your users. In order not to lose these users to functional flaws and errors, you need to make sure all those features and their operational behavior correspond to the intended functional specifications.
For example, if you’re building an eCommerce storefront, the demand for your products wouldn’t matter if you don’t have a reliable shopping cart and checkout systems in place. Functional testing helps you make sure such crucial features work as intended and don’t cost you your current and prospective customers.
Usability testing
You can’t really get your website visitors to use its features if they don’t even understand how to properly access or interact with them. Before you launch your website, you need to make sure the content is clear, features on the website are easy to use, and every step your users take is intuitive. Usability testing is essential to improving navigation, user experience, and the efficiency of interaction with the products and services presented on your website.
Database testing
Databases are the backbone (or quite literally the back end) of any website or web application. These systems are critical to your website’s successful operation as they are in charge of efficient storage, organization, and processing of all of your data.
Database testing helps you verify that query execution on your website works correctly and every piece of data presented matches the one in your database. It also helps optimize response time of all the queries and make certain that their execution does not affect the integrity of your data.
Compatibility testing
In addition to a huge variety of desktop computers, today there are about 14 billion mobile devices globally, featuring all kinds of different hardware, screen sizes, operating systems, browsers, etc. With all these different platforms and browsers your target audience may use to access your website, you want to make sure everything looks and performs as intended on each and every one of them. Compatibility testing is used to verify that your website is displayed properly, performs well, and meets all the hardware and network requirements of the platforms you’re aiming for.
Performance testing
With the abundance of sources of content, various products, and services on the web, today’s online users have become terribly sensitive to performance issues they encounter. Things like poor response times and load balancing issues have become major triggers for users to never want to come back to your website.
Performance testing plays a critical part in your website deployment preparations. Your software testing team takes your website through various levels of loads and stress to gather performance metrics and help you understand the behaviour of the website in different expected and extreme conditions. Performance website testing helps you ensure its high speed, responsiveness, and stability at all times.
Security testing
Compared to things like functionality, performance, and usability that only affect the experience, the security of your website is actually the one area that can get you in real trouble if overlooked. That’s why it is so important to identify and eliminate any gaps and vulnerabilities your website might have.
Security testing is a type of website testing used to make certain your data and resources are well-protected from possible misuse and attacks. It reveals flaws in the security mechanisms of your website to help you improve your data integrity, confidentiality, and security from personal information of your users to financial transactions.
Get help of a professional website testing company
Without proper website testing, numerous issues may reveal themselves and either cause you significant losses or even be fatal to your business. To avoid these undesirable outcomes, you need to make sure no error or vulnerability, no usability or performance issue remains after the deployment. And if you don’t have the skills or the capacity to deal with those issues yourself, you need to know how to choose a reliable tech partner for the job.
TestFort has been providing software testing and quality assurance services for more than 19 years already. Our QA engineers have completed over 800 projects in various domains from retail to healthcare. We can test your website or web app across an entire range of browsers and platforms and carefully document everything we find in a very clear, concise manner.
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