Overview of Website Testing
Website testing is a special type of software testing that caters to finding bugs in websites exclusively. Though the basic concept of testing is quite the same, there are few differences in the way testing ensues.
Reasons to test your website
Testing your website is very important and here are a few reasons to convince you about that:
Before you begin with your website testing, be ready with a checklist to not to miss on any part of it.
For Functional Testing
For Performance Testing
For Web Usability Testing
For Compatibility Testing
Validate your website with
For Web Security Testing
Website testing can be broadly divided into various parts:
#1. Functional Testing
Tests the functionality of the website and ensure it works as per the requirement specification.
#2. Browser Compatibility Testing
Your users might be using different browsers and to offer a smooth browsing experience to ensure that you conduct a vivid round of browser compatibility testing. It ensures that your website works fine on various different browsers.
#3. Usability Testing
Your website should be easy to use for the users, it should provide easy navigation, usage and look and feel to the users.
#4. Accessibility Testing
Accessibility testing can be called as a subset of usability testing, where testing is done whether your website can be easy to use by disabled people. It specifically tests if your website is designed in consideration with people with disability.
#5. Performance Testing
Your website has to bear some load on a day to day basis. Considering an average load condition, you should ensure that your website works fine under this load condition. Hence, performance testing of the website is done to test its stability and its responsiveness under a particular load.
#6. Stress and Load Testing
Your website can at times be subjected to undue load conditions and it should be fairly designed to work properly under such heavy load conditions. Hence it is important to conduct stress and load testing to test website stability under heavy load conditions.
#7. Site Monitoring
Regular down times can lessen the trust of your users on your website. Hence it is important to automatically observe your website to test for downtime.
#8. Conversion Rate Testing
Dealing with the testing of how to convert more visitors into customers, this has become the favorite website testing of the present day world.
#9. Security Testing
Websites are prone to hacking; hence testing their security is at most important.
#10. Spelling and Grammar Checking
Spelling and grammar mistakes can have a bad impression for your brand, so thoroughly check your content for spelling and grammar errors.
Techniques to reduce your website testing efforts
Some of the techniques that you can imply to reduce your testing efforts are:
With automated testing, you can save a lot of time manually executing every test case and can further spend that time innovating better ways to enhance your testing efforts.
Since there are huge chances of people browsing your website through mobile devices, you need to test your website in various mobile devices and operating systems.
This can be a very tiring task to test your website on hundreds of available mobile devices, operating systems, and combustion of both. And hence an easy way out is to use mobile emulators and simulators.
Live web testing allows you to debug a website on various browsers and operating system combinations instantly available in the Cloud.
Here are some website testing tips to get better results:
1) Integrate Exploratory Testing with Conventional Testing Techniques
Exploratory testing has a few shortcomings. You can simply overcome these by assimilating exploratory testing with other testing methods. It helps in producing more reliable test results, and significantly reducing the time for testing.
2) Don’t miss on Sanity testing – it’s important!
Sanity testing can immensely help you in validating the functions and features of your website in reduced time.
3) Validate All Third-Party Applications, Plug-ins, and Extensions
Test if the extensions and plug-ins are completely compatible with the web application and also detect the defects in them. Remember they can adversely affect the performance of your website.
4) Automate the chatbox testing
Chatbots testing has to be done in different testing environments and also the coordination among the bots needs to be rigorously tested. This can be a painstaking task and hence it is better to automate chatbox testing efforts.
5) Keep URL String Unalterable
Hackers have an ability to alter URL string to hack sensitive information or to redirect your site to some malicious link. Try to keep your URL string unalterable to avoid any chances of malicious activities.
6) Test with a hacker’s IQ
Try testing your website with the intent of a hacker and try finding to hack a website with minimal resistance for best results.
7) Be a Part of Development Team
With the increasing adaptation of Agile methodology and DevOps learn to work in coordination with developers, business analysts, and customer.
Here are a few website testing tools that can decrease your testing efforts considerably.
Conclusion
Websites are different from desktop software, so treat them differently and follow website testing methodology to get the best testing results. They are seamlessly integrating and interacting with other software around the globe. So testing is important as lot is at stake.
Technique adopted to test application that are hosted in a website is named as web application testing
Web apps serve as the business front for any business. To make sure that companies reputation is not at stake. Testing has to be done to ensure maximum stability and functionality.
Many are available at the moment, however, major ones are, Jmeter, Grinder, Capybara, OpenSTA etc.
You must be a professional tester to test the technicalities. However, to be a user tester only basic idea about the functioning of website is required.
There are steps or methods that ought to be followed while testing a website. Steps include, Functionality Testing, Usability Testing, Interface Testing, Compatibility Testing, Performance Testing and Security Testing have to be done for end-to-end testing.