Whether it is a blog of website, you need to do many round of testing before releasing it to public internet. The website should be optimized in terms of usability, efficiency and compatibility. The usability issues of the websites needs to be addressed in order to make it customer friendly. Efficiency testing not only targets the performance of the site in terms of speed but also in terms of search engine optimization. Compatibility testing includes cross browser testing, mobile platform compatibility including smart phones and various mobile browsers.
It is always important to have an efficient website for better results in terms of business as well as brand building. This is true for all categories of websites including B2B, B2C or even blogs and other general purpose sites.
There are many different things you need to consider to make a website ready to publish. Starting from choosing the web hosting options there are a number of critical things to consider. Here in this article we are not discussing about the infrastructure related steps including, hosting and backup but only about the usability, efficiency and compatibility aspects of the website.Related:
- Top 10 Things to Consider When Setting Up Your Blog.
- 45 Plus Most Basic Web Design and Webmaster Tips
The points listed here are most suited for websites and blogs which are available on public domains.
Top 10 Website Testing Guidelines
Check your Website’s Usability score
Accessibility, Readability and Performance of your website are the key factors that influence the usability of your website. Websites which has poor usability rank always suffer from high bounce rate and decreased page views. Internationalization, easy navigation, situational usage, device independence, content clarity etc are the few points to be considered while reviewing your websites usability. Read the below article to know more about website usability and quality attributes.
- Website Usability and Quality Attributes -10 Point Checklist
- How to Create Mobile Version of Your Website or Blog?
Test website in Different Screen Resolutions
Your customers and readers use many different hardware and screens to access your website. Because of this the screen resolution will differ based on the device. You need to ensure that the website appears exactly the same across different screen resolutions. This will help people to access your website from any device. Read the below post to learn how to test your website in different screen resolutions
Browser compatibility Testing
Cross browser compatibility testing is a must of all types of web properties. People use many different devices and browsers. As a website designer or developer you need to make sure a consistent rendering of the website across all the browsers. There are many different tools available to do this testing. Read about many different tools in the following articles.
- Top 10 Tools to Test Cross Platform Browser Compatibility
- IETester : Browser Compatibility Check for Internet Explorer 5.5 to 9
- Online tools to check browser compatibility -Cross platform browser test
Validate HTML, CSS, RSS, ATOM, Mobile compatibility of your website
There are many different services including the W3C Markup Validation Service to test your website to validate the HTML, CSS, RSS, ATOM, Mobile compatibility of your website. Always fix all possible CSS, HTML and script errors. A buggy site always gets abandoned by people. Read the below post to know more about complete website testing.
Test website speed against benchmarks
We have already discussed about the speed benchmarks for websites. When you do benchmark testing your website is compared to other similar websites in the Internet. Performance usually measured in terms of load time, speed and availability of the website. Read the below article to know more about how to do a benchmark testing and the tools available to do a benchmark test.
How to Test your Website Speed against Benchmarks?
Test your website from different geographies
Testing your website from different geographies reveals the problems related to your websites availability and speed based on the geography. There are few good free tools available to test your website from much different geography.
Stress test the website
This is required to check how stable your website is under different load conditions. You may sometimes experience sudden spike in traffic. Apart from the capability of the hosting server, your application also should be able to respond within time limits. This is particularly important for sites which are dynamic and generates content by processing data. A mainly e-commerce site falls into these categories. But even simple blogs needs to be tested appropriately.
Read the article Free Tool to Load Test and Stress Test Website to know more about how to perform a stress testing using simple tools. Even HTTP debugging tools like Fiddler can be used for Performance Testing.
Validate your site in terms of SEO
Search engine optimization is the key to get indexed by search engines. Keep your site search engine friendly. There are plenty of things to be done to make your website SEO optimized. Read our extensive article collections on SEO to learn more about it.
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