Website testing explained

A website audit aims to identify areas of improvement to help your website work better, improve customer experience, and also help to improve search engine results.

Our audits cover more than 380 checks, but are flexible to cover all aspects and variations of bespoke websites.

Website Audits

Our FREE website audit checklist contains more than 135 visual and technical points to check on desktop, mobile and tablet. Download it now... No strings attached and no small print!

Free website audit PDF

What do your customers think about your website? Are they happy with it? Is your website easy enough for customers to engage with? How do you know?

Let Targa test it for you...

Usability Testing ⇨

Don't cut corners on cross browser testing! There are many browser versions in existence. Certainly some are more popular than others, and there is also a wider range of screen sizes and mobile devices than ever before.

Chrome, Internet Explorer, Edge and Safari are all commonplace, and manufacturers of phones and tablets such as Samsung and Huawei have their own browsers.

Cross Browser Testing ⇨

Functional testing covers many areas... There will certainly be common things across all websites such as whether the navigation works correctly on all devices, and that all links on each web page work and access their intended target?

Some websites might need to allow users search for products, compare them with other products and purchase them. Perhaps the user will also to need create or log into their account. The is so much functionality involved, and potentially hundreds of failure points that testing absolutely had to be factored into every piece of development work. For SEO purposes, functional testing could also include Schema Markup and Open Graph tag testing.

Some websites might need to allow users search for products, compare them with other products and purchase them. Perhaps the user will also to need create or log into their account. The is so much functionality involved, and potentially hundreds of failure points that testing absolutely had to be factored into every piece of development work.

Functional Testing ⇨

For most web projects, business requirements should be clearly defined, documented and communicated to the development team and any other people who will be involved in its implementation and testing.

However, before the new project goes live it will need to be tested to ensure that it meets the business requirements. So a level of testing called User Acceptance Testing needs to be carried out.

Regression testing (also known as sanity testing is carried out to make sure that things which worked prior to coding updates still work as intended afterwards.

Regression testing also applies when bugs are fixed, as it means going back and re-running previous test cases to make sure that not only are the bugs fixed, but no new problems have been created as a result of the fixes.

Regression testing can be carried out manually, but there are certain aspects of functional regression testing which can be automated and quickly executed with the use of testing application tools such as Unified Functional Testing (UFT).

There may be the opinion that regression testing shouldn't be necessary if the web developers did not make mistakes. But even without mistakes there is always the potential that something can go wrong, and often it does!

With very few exceptions, all websites should be responsive, which means that websites should be compatible with mobile devices as well as desktops or laptops.

Instead of web pages shrinking down to the size of a narrow mobile phone screen, they should be designed to display in a way that is optimised for mobiles, both visually and in terms of images and data structure.

With more than 50% of internet users using their phones, it's essential to make sure that websites are responsive, and therefore mobile friendly.

Testing a website on a smartphone is NOT the same as testing an app on the same device.

Apps on mobile phones have different characteristics and capabilities compared to websites.

Apps can make use of some of the features of the individual smartphone, such as location information, ID security and other information which may be used and stored in the user's profile.

Even though a tablet in landscape orientation is similar in proportion to the average laptop, unless each page of a website has also been designed to display correctly on the taller, narrower aspect ratio of a tablet in portrait mode, the vertical orientation of the device can cause some web pages to display poorly.

Also bear in mind that when using a desktop or laptop you can hover your mouse pointer over links and features on a web page, which could cause things to happen, such as the expansion of a menu, buttons might change colour, or a display panel to transform in some way when you hover over it. On a tablet there is no hover over and so the user needs to tap the screen, and so the differences in how events are triggered should also be factored in to testing a website on a tablet.

Also be aware that tablet browsers can differ in many ways between those on Android and iOS (Apple) devices.

If your customers discovered pricing anomalies on your website before you did and reported them to you, what would you do? Respond but hope that nobody else notices? Take the time to test and replicate the problem, and then test other scenarios to see if other errors occur, and carry out the necessary analysis to diagnose and fix the problem?

It's not hard to find examples of pricing discrepancies on social media. Don't be amongst them... Pay due diligence, test as many scenarios as you need to, and fix any errors you find.