After development, any website should go through a series of activities aimed at detecting and fixing errors in web design, layout, and improving user experience. This directly affects behavioral indicators, so you need to pay maximum attention to them. Without proper analysis and testing, it will be difficult for a project to get to the top of search results. Testing the website allows you to check the performance of all functions according to the terms of reference, the speed and stability of work, the readability of information, the convenience of navigating through the site, protection from web attacks, and so on.
For example, we’ll compare the developed website with a wedding celebration. You have contacted the agency to organize your wedding celebration. You discussed all the decorative and musical design, the whole program. The promised magical atmosphere should give guests and newlyweds unforgettable moments, but the event turned out to be rather disgusting. It did not meet your expectations and you were fully disappointed.
The similarity of the wedding celebration and the developed website is that there can be such combinations: external design of the holiday or the design of the site to be at the highest level and the program of events or the functionality of the site with flaws and vice versa. Sometimes it happens when not everything meets your requirements. To appreciate the wedding, no matter how trite it may sound, it is enough to live this day. However, it is not easy to define what a website is. Competent testing is the only solution.
Services and Testing Methods
Services and testing methods are various, but make up your mind on a strategy from the beginning and stick to it. Think over a plan of action and follow it consistently. The main types of testing:
- correlation of the actual design;
- checking the layout for validity;
- functional testing;
- stress testing;
- website security testing;
- compatibility testing.
No website development is completed without design errors. Not so hard to match the layout of the finished design as to check every element and type of pages. Moreover, the mobile and tablet versions require even more attention and modeling of possible adaptations for each gadget or browser.
To make the actual design as close to the one approved in the terms of reference as possible, a checklist is presented below. Requirements to design vary from one project to another, depending on the type of website and individual preferences of the customer. Therefore, the list of items for checking includes only the main ones:
- the color scheme of the site;
- main heading;
- subheadings;
- links;
- lists;
- paragraphs and indents;
- tables;
- location;
- the presence of blocks.
Checking the Webpages for Validity
To make the developed web resource equally displayed in different browsers, so would less time was spent on its loading and search engines understand the content better, there is a mandatory point in the testing – validation. There is a standard that defines the rules and regulations of website building. Based on this Consortium a special Markup Validation service was worked out. We all should check our site there. If you get a lot of errors, contact the webmaster for their elimination. Some of them may remain even after corrections, but it will not be so critical.
Functional Testing
It is one of the most time-consuming kind of testing that requires correct function calculations. For example, let’s consider an online store, which has not only promotions for goods, but also a lot of buying statuses, a certain number of products. All combinations have to be checked.
The functionality depends on the type of the resource being checked, but there are basic elements that you should pay attention to:
- testing custom forms;
- checking the performance of the search and the relevance of the search results;
- navigation testing – clicks on links to detect broken ones;
- checking the server files uploading;
- testing the registration form and authorization;
- stress testing.
To prevent an unexpected shutdown of the site during the users’ peak hour, it is reasonable to conduct stress testing. In order to carry it out use services that simulate a gradual increase of traffic on the website. If the site’s load time remains the same as at the low traffic level, that means there’s no problem. For online stores, we can also test the implementation of simultaneous transactions to get the response time of all the most important business functions.
Website security testing
Every type of website performs a different list of works aimed at finding vulnerabilities. It is necessary to eliminate them in time so that hackers could not arrange a “collapse” of your channel for attracting new customers via the Internet. Security testing diagnoses the ways of hacking the system evaluates the security of the website and analyzes the risks of intruders’ access to confidential data. So to secure your Internet resource properly, you need to contact expensive programmers for detailed testing. The main objects of vulnerability testing:
- access control;
- authentication diagnostics;
- validation of input values;
- cryptography;
- error handling mechanisms;
- integration with third-party services;
- checking the site’s resistance to Dos/DDos attacks;
- server configuration;
- compatibility testing;
Conclusion
There is always something to be checked on the website. For instance: searching for errors in content and checking it for uniqueness, testing site loading speed, usability, compliance of meta tags and Title with a good tone of Internet promotion, and so on. Some types of testing require technical expertise and Internet marketing experience. Nevertheless, it’s possible for anyone to spend a little time studying the course and test his side without developers.