A beautiful and functional website may work great for you, but that doesn’t mean it will work for everyone. Without enough testing data, you never know what problems are hiding on your websites. When 83% of customers believe a seamless website experience is critical, you can’t afford for this to happen.
The last thing you want to do is launch a website at the end of the website design process without any tests. Follow the guide below to make testing websites for problems easier.
Define Your Testing Goals
The first step to any good website test is defining your goals for the test. Your goals will change based on if you’re building a new website or if you’re adding additional functionality to an existing site.
They can also change based on the goals of your business. An information website, for instance, will be different than a site that offers a ton of functionality.
Think of your current business goals and how your website helps you achieve those goals to best figure this out. What parts of your site are most important to those goals?
Those are the parts of your site you need to work on to get the most out of the website testing process.
Create Your Metrics
Knowing what metrics to test is a crucial part of successful website testing. Since you know what your test goals are, that makes this process easier.
Take informational content, for instance. Your goal here is to inform the visitor and maximize the user experience.
Does your page load quickly and have no broken images? You can also track where people focus their attention to ensure they get the best information.
If you have a web app, you’ll need to see how many breaking bugs your website has. You’ll also need to track the error rate in your app to see if any parts of your site regularly break.
Pick the Right Testing Method
With so many types of websites available, not every type of testing works for everyone. Below are several of the main types of user testing you can use for your site.
Functionality Testing
Functional testing is the process of testing the features of your website. This includes things like contact forms, event scheduling, report generation, and any other unique features your website has. Your goal is to feed input to your website functions and see what output you receive.
Your functional test fails if the output doesn’t match what you expect.
Usability Testing
Usability testing is the testing process that checks how usable your site is for your users. You can use usability testing in combination with other forms of testing. Its goal is to see how easy your site is to use and what your visitors think of your site’s design.
Compatibility Testing
It isn’t enough for your site to work great on a single device. You need to collect many data points about every device to see how it runs on those systems.
That’s where compatibility testing helps. You run your site on different devices to check for device-specific problems.
Performance Testing
People expect websites that perform well these days. If it takes too long for your site to respond, you’ll probably lose a lot of visitors.
Performance testing checks your site’s performance on several devices and internet speeds. It will help you track down slow-performing elements on your site and optimize them for speed.
Security Testing
Security is critical for every website these days. There are countless security threats, and it only takes a single mistake to compromise your website.
Security testing will help you track down these issues. Your testers will input information on your site to see if they can do anything to compromise your site’s security.
Find Test Participants
Once you understand the tests that you need to run and your goals, it’s time to recruit people to test your site. To start, you can handle this yourself. Run through your website features and send issues back to your developers.
Of course, you won’t find every issue yourself. To do this, you’ll need to recruit testers that are your target audience.
You can find these people online or reach out to your local community. In some cases, you can offer discounted services in exchange for helping find site issues.
Create Test Scenarios
Having great testers is only one part of testing your website. If your testers have no direction, you won’t be able to find many issues.
Create test cases that guide your testers through your website. These test cases need to test every main feature of your site inside the scope of testing.
Most testing companies do this by creating step-by-step instructions for testing. You’ll provide the input and expected output and get feedback from your testers.
Of course, you can do free-form testing too. However, make sure you have enough testing data to cover every primary part of your site.
Gather Testing Data
You’re ready to analyze your results once your testers finish the job. Since you already defined what metrics to collect, you’ll need to organize your data into reports to read. This report is an excellent example of what you can produce.
Once you have your test reports in a digestible format, use them to look for significant issues on your website. Send the results back to your development team to resolve the problems.
Of course, don’t just stop at one testing cycle. You may need a few testing iterations to make your website ready for public launch.
Don’t Ignore Testing Websites for Mistakes
It’s tempting to want to launch your site after completing a lengthy website development process, but doing so is a mistake. Great developers aren’t immune to making mistakes. Use the guide above to make testing websites easy and launch the best version of your site to your visitors.
Do you want to learn what it takes to grow your site after completing the design? Learn a few traffic generation tips by checking out the blog.