The final and most important stage of building your website is testing. You have spent weeks (even months) crafting the perfect site and will want to make sure everyone enjoys it without any issues or errors.
This can be a daunting task with the wide range of variables out there, from device size to internet speed. To make this a little easier we have put together a list of our top four tools we use for testing.
Compatibility testing
The first and potentially the most important item to check is that your new site displays correctly on all devices, browsers and operating systems. However, the likelihood of you having access to every device and screen size is slim. This is why we use BrowserStack.
BrowserStack gives you access to the most popular phones and tablets (Android and iOS) on the market today, as well as a full range of browsers and operating systems (including older browsers like Internet Explorer 8 & 9).
Speed testing
Speed is becoming more important than ever (with Google even now using it as a ranking factor). If your site takes too long, people do not wait around, they leave and find a faster loading site. To test page speed we use tools like GTMetrix and Google PageSpeed Insights. These tools not only tell what your current speed score is, but they will also tell you how to improve your score.
But remember, the idea is to get your site as fast as possible, NOT to get a perfect score, don’t sacrifice functionality and design just to get top marks.
The kitchen sink test
When working with a CMS like WordPress, we like to do something called the kitchen sink test. To do this we copy all commonly used html elements used on a website such as header tags, p tags, lists and tables etc and paste them on a page to make sure everything displays correctly.
Use a site like Prandall, copy everything there and paste it on to a blank page in your CMS, if coded correctly, everything should have its own style.
Browser tools
Utilise the tools within your browser. For example, Chrome’s developer tool is full of useful tools to check your website such as the network tab, to show you how your website loads and the audit tab that will test everything from performance to SEO.
In addition to the default tools there also various plugins which you can add to your browser. For example, the Web Developer extension gives you a heap of additional options from checking all your alt text to disabling JavaScript.
