A Webmaster’s Guide to Website Testing

In the current era of SEO & Internet marketing, website testing is absolutely indispensible. What if, a webmaster has some basic knowledge about site testing? Obviously, this is something very beneficial. Having know-how about testing enables the webmaster to investigate the drawbacks of site in terms of performance. The technical issues identified can be then consulted with the development team & the experts for a timely resolution of the problem. Here, in our today’s post we have tried to provide a basic tutorial about website testing for the webmasters.

Requirement of Website Testing

Website Testing has a sole purpose to verify whether the “Developed Website “is functioning well or not according to the expectations characterized through the customer’s specifications. Its overall objective is to identify each and every possible bug that exists and to reveal all those situations that could negatively impact the customer.

Quick & Essential testing guide:

1. Functionality Testing- This type of testing includes the testing of

• Outgoing links from all pages of the website
• All internal links and the links used to send E-mail to admin or other users
• Validations on input fields.
• Wrong inputs and option to create or modify the forms, if any.

2. Usability Testing- This type of testing ensures that Website is easy and light to use. It checks whether the provided instructions satisfy the purpose or not. It includes the test for

• Navigation
• Website Content
  

3. Compatibility Testing- Following Compatibility tests are to be executed

• Browser Compatibility to test the web application on different browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, etc. with their different versions.
• Mobile Browsing to test your web pages on mobile browsers.
  

4. Performance Testing– Web Performance Testing should include

• Web load Testing to ensure that the site can handle multiple simultaneous user requests and large input data from users if many users are accessing or requesting the same page. It also includes simultaneous connection to DB, heavy load on specific pages, etc.
• Web Optimization/Speed Testing to analyze the Loading Speed of your website. It helps you in learning how to increase the Loading Speed of your website. Some on-line tools like Pingdom Tools and Webpagetest are worth mentioning here.
  

5. Security Testing– Following things are featured in Security Testing-

• Test by pasting internal URL directly into the address bar of the browser without login to make sure that the page is not opening directly.
• Testing the system reaction on invalid inputs like invalid user-name, password, input text boxes, etc.
• Testing the CAPTCHA for automated script login and SSL for security measures.
• Testing transactions, error messages, security breach attempts, etc. These components must get logged in log files somewhere on web server.

Amazing Facts about testing

An error in Software testing can cost you from nothing to Billions of Dollars. You can go through a number of stories about Computer System failure that have been attributed to errors in the Software. For an illustration, consider the case of United States. If the newly released study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, belonging to the Department of Commerce is to be believed, the U.S. Economy has to bear a huge amount of $59.5 Billion on their Software bugs which is equivalent to 0.6% of its GDP (Gross Domestic Product). Another example of Software malfunctioning was noticed when a Nuclear Reactor shut down due to an error in a single line of code.

We hope that the above website Testing tutorial will be of great to the webmasters & will facilitate them in detecting & resolving the issues hampering their site’s performance.