Why do things just seem to go wrong?
Ever found that something just suddenly stopped working properly?
It happens... your phone, your laptop, your car... your website!
Why is that? What changed? Did an update to one thing cause something else to break?
The importance of testing
Maybe your website is quite new and seemed to work fine at first. But then you clicked on a link, hovered over a feature, or realised that it doesn't properly work on a mobile phone.
It looks fine to me, so why are they complaining?
Maybe you think that it does work perfectly, but customers complain that they can't access things, buy products, submit the contact form, log in and update their profile, or are simply unable locate the some important information they're looking for.
These are classic examples of your customers finding the problems before you do, and that can be bad for your reputation and bad for business.
Why is testing necessary?
Testing is like an insurance...
Mistakes and errors shouldn't happen, but they do. Yet even when no errors are made, incompatibility problems can occur between new updates and existing functionality, including external things such as plug-ins, APIs, etc.
You might have no control over some of those external things, but they can change over time and negatively impact your website.
That's how things suddenly stop working
This doesn't mean you can do nothing about those incompatibility problems. Frequent testing can reveal issues, and then you can decide what remedial action to take. The question is, Can you afford to ignore them?
Not all website problems are functional...
Some problems might be visual, such as page layout, contrast, size, colour, positioning, labelling, and a whole number of things which might discourage potential customers from remaining on your website.
Prepared to take the risk?
A lack of testing is often why problems slip through the net and your customers find the problems before you do!
Appropriate testing procedures should reveal any problems with your website, and then those errors can be fixed before they become costly.
The scope of website and eCommerce testing
In many cases websites are just the front end of a larger system.
Larger organisations are likely to have websites which interact with back-end systems which will usually include databases, content management systems, CRM (customer relationship management) systems, and APIs (application programming interfaces) to allow different systems to communicate with each other.
Those same systems might also serve their customer support or telephone sales teams in addition to the website.
So having an awareness of the architecture of a system beyond the website, and having appropriate range of types of testing methods, reporting and bug tracking procedures in place is vital if you’re to minimise the risk and impact of things breaking.
Targa's website testing services
Targa's founder spent over 20 years of a 28 year long web career in international e-Commerce, from design, development, management, and of course testing, bug reporting, tracking and diagnosis.
This depth of experience allows us to go beyond typical QA testing services, by being able to dive deeper into the reasons that some problems have occurred, and provide some guidance on their cause.
That approach often extends to providing details of similar or potentially related scenarios on the same or other platforms, and reporting on whether or not those also reproduce the problem. Building a picture around the issue helps to isolate and identify the cause, and this can save a lot of time during bug fixing and re-testing.
