What is website testing and how to test a website effectively?

There's no denying the fact that in today's ever-changing and competitive world, the internet has become an indispensable part of our lives.

The majority of us make our decisions by looking through the web; therefore, having a website is no longer an option, rather a compulsion for all kinds of businesses. It is the initial step in letting the world know about you and staying relevant in the business world.

However, just having a website is not sufficient. An organization should have a website that is informative, easily accessible, and user-friendly. And to keep up with all these qualities, the website needs to be well tested, and this entire process is known as website testing.

Are you happy with the performance of your website? Has anyone brought up any issue or bug related to your website? Is your website functioning the way it should? 

If not, then you have arrived at the right place. Keep reading to find out everything about website testing, and how to conduct website testing effectively. 

What is Website Testing?

Website testing is conducted to test websites for potential bugs. It's full-fledged testing of websites before making them live. A website needs to be checked thoroughly for bugs, or any other issues, from end-to-end before it goes live to be used by the end-users.

By conducting website testing, an organization can ensure that its website is functioning correctly and will be accepted by real-time users.

Getting Started with Website Testing

In this section, we'll talk about the different categories of testing and how to test a website effectively. So, let's get started!

Unit Testing 

Unit testing is testing the smallest sections of code, usually individual functionalities or modules, in isolation. These small sections of code are termed units. 

The smaller the chunks of code you test, the better the results since testing smaller units provides you a more comprehensive view of the code's performance. Moreover, tests execute faster while dealing with small units. 

• For instance, see this login page.
• The login page is one small unit of a website. 
• So unit testing, in this case, would be to check its functionality and see if there’s an issue while logging in to this page. 

Integration Testing

While unit tests test the performance of isolated sections of your code, integration tests look for interactions among various pages, modules, or sections of your website. Integration testing checks if the different units of the website work well when combined or not. 

• Again take the login page, for instance.
• The user adds his or her credentials and clicks on login.

• If the user is directed to his or her account page, it means both the login page and the user account page are interlinked and are working fine.

Regression Testing

Regression Testing is performed to ensure that new revisions in the code do not have any adverse impact on the existing functionalities of the website. It assures that the old code still works fine even after the new updations have been done.

• Consider the filter tab section of webdew, for instance.
• The developer deletes the video tab from the homepage.

• So, in regression testing, you can check if all the pages and tab-clicking functionality are working after deleting the video tab. 

Functional Testing 

As the name indicates, functional testing tests the overall website's functionality and ensures that it works as per the specification. To conduct functional testing of a website, analyze the links across all the web pages, look for database connectivity, forms for getting user information, Cookie testing, etc.

• Look for broken or incorrect links. For instance, in the image, you can see the button is linked to google, which is wrong, of course.

• Check form field validation. Consider all the fields are mandatory, so if a user clicks on submit without filling all the required fields, a message should pop up on the screen. 

• Check if the filters are working fine—for example, sort from a to z, date-wise, name-wise, size-wise, etc.

• Check if all the buttons are working fine or not. Are they clickable or not?
• Check if the anchor links are working correctly. Make sure to check that no anchor link is either empty or redirects to the wrong page.

Usability Testing

Usability testing checks how user-friendly a website is. A website should be easy to use, offer easy navigation, and easy to understand, yet an attractive appearance and feel.

• All pages should be easy to understand. 
• Navigation should be on every page and easy to use. 

• There should be no grammatical or spelling mistakes. 
• Images should be placed properly and in proper size.

User Interface Testing

UI Testing,  otherwise called GUI testing, tests the various aspects of a website that a user will come into contact with. This normally involves testing the visual elements to verify that they are working as intended in terms of functionality, performance, and user-experience. 

• Check the website layout as created by the website designer.
• Ensure that the font color, font size, and font type are the same on all pages, as per the project's guidelines.

• The button size and shape should be the same on all pages.

• Make sure that all the social media icons work when clicked and redirect to the right social media account. 

• Check hover cursor tooltip.

• Check if the form fields accept the right input format or any value. For instance, the email field should only accept the correct email format, and when you can enter the wrong email format, you should get a message to enter the correct email. Same with the case with the rest of the form fields.

• Testing with different screen resolutions is undoubtedly necessary, given how most users often use mobile phones or tablets over desktops. Therefore, make sure to test your website for different screen resolutions to see if everything is being displayed correctly or not. This is where website responsiveness comes into play.

Compatibility Testing

The compatibility of your website is indeed a very significant testing aspect. Therefore, for compatibility testing, check your website for:

• Cross-Browser compatibility
• Operating system compatibility
• Mobile browsing compatibility
• Printing options

Performance Testing 

A website needs to bear some load on a day-to-day basis. Keeping in mind the average load condition, you need to ensure that your website works fine even under this load condition. Therefore, performance testing of a website is done to test its durability and its responsiveness under a specific load or stress.

Load testing 

Check how much load your website can handle when several users are using it or providing any input. For example, if 1 million users can open your website simultaneously, it means your website can handle the load of millions of users.

Stress testing

Stress testing is performed to try and break the website by adding stress and checking how it reacts and how it recovers from the crash.

Connection Speed

Check your website with different internet connections to see how much time it takes the website to open, images, or a particular page to load.

Security Testing

Indeed, websites are prone to hacking; hence testing their security becomes quite important. The main reason behind testing the security of a website is to identify potential vulnerabilities and consequently repair them. Basically, security testing is used to secure a website from unauthorized attacks.

• Test if SSL website security is used for security measures. If used, the proper message should get displayed when users switch from non-secure HTTP:// pages to secure HTTPS:// pages and vice versa.

• Paste the internal URL directly into the browser address bar without logging in. The internal pages should not open.
• Put some invalid inputs in the input fields like username, password, text boxes, etc., and see how the website reacts to these invalid inputs.

Watch this short video clip to understand how a website testing is performed.

Wrapping Up

Websites are not the same as software, so treat them differently. Since websites play a very crucial role in a business's growth, a lot is at stake. Hence,  do follow website testing methodology to get the best testing results.  

Hope this article helps you learn the different aspects of website testing. So the next time you sit to write a test plan for your website, make sure to consider various aspects of the website beyond the functionality.

And if you still have any questions about web development or website testing, feel free to ask. 

Editor: Richa Sharma