The Importance of Website Testing
There are many steps to a website development project. There’s the research, the strategizing, the designing, the programming—all important stages of a website project. Arguably one of the most crucial steps comes at the very end: Website testing.
What is website testing?
It’s just what it sounds like! Website testing involves the complete testing of a website before it’s pushed “live” for the public. This applies to any development work, big or small. Whether it’s a brand new website being built or a small update to an existing web page. Testing serves to identify any issues with design, functionality, usability, and performance.
Why is it so important?
The proper functionality and professionalism of a website are crucial for capturing leads and completing other website goals you may have set. Users today are savvy—and a bit wary—when navigating websites. If elements are buggy, pages are blank, or things break when clicked, you will lose trust with users and may lose business as a result. “Good enough” doesn’t cut it. Testing mitigates these problems and improves the overall user experience.
If you work with us to build a new website for you, we’ll get to a stage of the project where you’ll hear us tell you to “try and break the website.” We aren’t being sarcastic– We mean it! We want you to try everything you can to break the website. And things will break! No matter how great or skilled the programmer is, the testing phase will reveal things that are buggy or broken.
And that’s why the testing phase is so important— It helps us catch any issues before we launch the site. So when real users begin to use the site, they’re not met with things breaking or acting buggy.
What does it mean to "try and break a website"?
Well, it means you click any and everything, in all different orders, on different browsers, on different screen sizes, and keep track of anything that breaks! We do extensive testing on all development projects. However, before we push it live, we’ll often enlist our clients for an extra set of eyes.
Helpful tools for website testing
If website testing sounds like a bit arduous, it’s because it is. Depending on the size of the website project, it can be a big undertaking. That’s why we make sure to allow enough time in our project schedule to give us time for thorough testing. We’ve also picked up some tools that greatly help us streamline this process. Here are a few of the most notable!
1
Browserstack
This is a cloud based service that allows you to test websites and applications across various browsers on all sorts of different (real!) devices. It prevents you from having to buy a million different devices to test on different screen sizes. (Though having that many toys to play with would be fun!)
2
Bugherd
Bugherd is possibly our favorite tool for website testing. It’s a visual feedback tool that allows you to essentially leave “sticky notes” directly on the website pages themselves. If you find something broken or buggy on a specific page, you can log a bug that lives directly on that page (only visible to Bugherd admins). This prevents the need for creating complicated documents with screenshots jammed in somehow. (We’ve tried this. It’s not fun.)
3
Google Docs Editors
We know we just threw shade at documents for tracking website testing, but they do have a place. If a website project is particularly large, it’s helpful to split up the pages/sections of the site.
Google Sheets have come in handy for us in countless full website development projects. You can easily organize all the necessary web page details and list out who is responsible for testing each page. It also helps us keep track of what pages have or have not been tested yet. This is a great high-level document for ensuring that no pages fall through the cracks during website testing.
Sweat the Small Stuff
Big projects or small, testing is non-negotiable. Even small tweaks and changes to websites require diligent testing. We sweat the small stuff here!
Would you like our help building—and breaking—websites? We’d love to talk to you about your website needs!
Let's chat!
About the author:
Celestia Trumbo
Senior Account Manager
Celestia is the Senior Account Manager at Torx. She spends her days meeting with clients and managing projects to ensure everything runs smoothly and that our clients’ visions are brought to life. She loves soaking up as much technical information from our developers as she can, to equip her to best help our clients. She hopes that this technical know-how will also help her win at trivia one day!