Happy to risk your money going down the drain?
Reasons to test your website
Not testing your website could be costly!
Testing your website can significantly help reduce risks of visual and functional errors and other potential issues.
Here are 7 of the main reasons to have your website tested...
Not testing your website can pose several risks and potential issues.
What could happen if don't test my website?
Let's start by asking
How much of an impact would it have on your business if your website stopped working for a couple of days?
You'll know the monthly or yearly revenue figures for your own business, but in reality the potential losses depends on how important your website is to your business...
If your website is at the heart of your business where it enables customers to buy products, book tickets, subscribe to an online course, make hotel reservations, book a holiday or rent a car, you're likely to be really concerned if your website web down even for a few minutes.
7 good reasons to have your website tested
We all like to save money, especially when the cost seems unnecessary or unappealing. After all, how exciting is it possible to get over website testing? But on the other hand, the anxiety, embarrassment and cost (to name just a few) you're likely to experience when your website breaks or customers start complaining can start to make testing feel like a worthwhile activity... like an insurance.
So let's look at 7 good reasons to test your website...
1: User Experience Problems
Testing helps identify user experience issues, such as broken links, slow page load times, or unresponsive design. Neglecting testing may lead to a poor user experience, frustrating visitors and causing them to leave your site.
2: Compatibility Issues
Websites are accessed on various devices, browsers, and operating systems. Without testing, you may encounter compatibility problems that make your site look or function differently across different platforms. This can result in a loss of functionality, distorted layouts, or even complete incompatibility.
3: SEO Implications
Search engines prioritise user experience and functionality. If your website has usability issues or broken features due to a lack of testing, it may negatively impact your search engine rankings. This can result in decreased organic traffic and potential loss of business opportunities.
4: Security Vulnerabilities
Testing helps uncover security vulnerabilities in your website, such as weak authentication mechanisms, input validation issues, or inadequate data protection. Ignoring security testing can leave your website exposed to attacks, potentially compromising user data, and damaging your reputation.
5: Performance Bottlenecks
Load testing and performance testing are crucial to ensure your website can handle user traffic efficiently. Without testing, you may encounter performance bottlenecks, slow response times, or even crashes during peak periods. This can lead to dissatisfied visitors, decreased conversion rates, and lost revenue.
6: Functional Defects
Testing helps to identify functional defects in your website's code and features. Without thorough testing, you risk launching a website that contains bugs, broken functionality, or incorrect behavior. This can result in frustrated users, increased customer support inquiries, and a negative impact on your brand image.
7: Financial Loss
Poorly tested websites can lead to financial losses. If your website has usability issues or security vulnerabilities, you may experience decreased customer retention, increased bounce rates, and reduced conversion rates. Additionally, fixing issues post-launch is often more expensive than addressing them during the testing phase.
They can ALL be costly
All of the above have the potential for losing you money, but not all capable of causing either a complete outage or disabling the main method of completing an online transaction. Those can be the most costly, especially where high volume eCommerce websites are concerned.
Let's do the maths...
As a business owner you'll know what your turnover is, and if you have an e-commerce website it will be easy to work out what your website generates each hour on average. You might then get an idea of how much you could lose if your website stops working for just one hour.
Let's look at some averages based on recent reports...
According to Grit Global, Data shows that a newly set eCommerce store can make just over $63,000 in monthly revenue in three months. While at one year, they can average $127,000 in monthly revenue, and after three years, they are ready to churn out an average monthly revenue of $352,000, an increase of over 175% between year one and year three.
Based on those numbers, we could work out the average hourly sales by multiplying hours in the day by 30 days in the month)
24 x 30 = 720 hours in a month (average)
We can then divide those monthly averages which Grit Global reported by the number of hours in a month
$63,000 / 720 = $87.5 per hour
$127,000 / 720 = $176.39 per hour
$352,000 / 720 = $488.89 per hour
What about well established brands?
Argos was reported to have had a turnover in 2021 of around £4.6 billion, with roughly 90% of that revenue (£4.14 billion) originating on it's website.
With there being 8760 hours in a year (365 x 24) we can see that the average hourly revneue.
£4.14 billion / 8760 = £472,600 per hourph
That's a huge amount of revenue to lose if their website goes down, but not all businesses are as big as Argos, so let's look at another example...
If we take the well established UK based company Screwfix, at time of writing the statistics reported by Similarweb showed the average number of visitors for March, April and May 2023 was 23.5 million visits per month. Meanwhile the numbers reported by Statista showed sales of £2,327 billion during 2022 for Screwfix.
There are many companies whose volumes exceed those numbers, including Hertz who I worked for for over 20 years. But to keep things simple we could easily calculate the average hourly sales for a company whose annual online turnover is £1 million and £1 billion.
Based on 365 x 24 (8760 hours per year)...
£1,000,000 / 8760 = £114.16 per hourph
£1,000,000,000 / 8760 = £114,155 per hourph
These numbers show the potential loss per hour depending on your own online sales volumes, but doesn't include any damage to brand reputation.
Of course there will be certain times of the day when an outages will be less costly, and those times when it will be more.
Is NOT testing your website worth the risk?
Is it worth the risk?
Hopefully the above numbers show why a lack of testing can be costly.
To mitigate these risks, it is advisable to invest in comprehensive testing processes, including functional testing, compatibility testing, performance testing, security testing, user experience testing, and others.
Regular testing throughout the development lifecycle and before launching updates or new features can help ensure a smooth and successful website launch while minimizing potential risks.
If you would like to discuss how Targa can help, get in touch and speak with me directly.
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I'm Daron Harvey, founder of Targa Web Solutions, specialising in website management, testing, auditing, troubleshooting & consultancy. I'm now in my 28th year of professional website production, testing and eCommerce best practices, including management of large multi-lingual multi $Billion global websites. No AI was needed or used to write the content on this page!
