What is Website QA and How to Perform?

The website quality assurance (QA) process involves testing your website to find any errors, glitches, or other shortcomings that may have gone unnoticed throughout the website development and design phases.

The crucial aspect of quality assurance is that it is a complete and continuing effort, as opposed to regression testing, requirements testing, user testing, and other popular types, which are more narrowly focused on specific problems.

You should also undertake QA testing before deploying a website, although other tests, such as user testing, should be performed only after the site has gone live.

Why is Quality Assurance Important for a Website?

Through QA testing, you can ensure that your website is ready for use and that users will have a positive experience right away.

While developing websites for yourself, QA testing is essential to provide a positive visitor experience. However, it is especially crucial to ensure that the website you deliver to clients is in good working order if you are creating websites for paying customers.

With people’s attention spans decreasing, a single site irregularity in the user experience may result in a user bouncing or loss of potential money. As a result, extensive website quality assurance testing should be required for all online businesses.

Performing extensive website QA testing on a more detailed level will:

• Enhance the functionality of your website by identifying future risks.
• Ensure that you appear more trustworthy and assist you in establishing your brand.
• You will save time and money over the long run since you can detect concerns early on before they escalate into more significant problems.

How to Perform a Quality Assurance Test on The Website?

Mobile Responsiveness:
Websites with responsive layouts dynamically adjust their size to fit the screen sizes being used to view them. Mobile devices account for over 60% of all inbound website traffic, so these users must not be overlooked.

Developers must ensure their websites are mobile-friendly to provide consumers with the best viewing experience across various screen resolutions.

Furthermore, a mobile-responsive design is required since Google has switched to a mobile-first indexing methodology. This means that using a responsive design boosts your SEO efforts.

However, responsive web design may present complications such as misaligned buttons or difficult-to-tap links.

Testing a responsive web design entails:

• Ensuring that all links and URLs are consistent across browsers and devices.
• Depending on the browser, does the website load differently?
• Does dynamic content allocation alter when the screen resolution changes?

2. UI and Design Testing:
UI testing is checking your website’s design and interface to ensure consistency and looks correct in all browsers and scenarios. You should do the following tests in this area:

Consistency
Do your site’s colours, fonts, font sizes, layouts, buttons, and other design elements all match up across the website?

Screen Resolutions
Does your site appear correctly in all sizes? In addition to low resolutions, your website must function at high resolution because many visitors now have 2K or even 4K screens.

Localization
Do essential interface components still work efficiently if you have a multilingual website? While translating text, layouts and interface designs can easily become affected since the translation may take up varying amounts of space. Along with this, testing also involves behaviour testing, accuracy and relevancy of software based on geographic location

3. Cross Browser Compatibility:
There is a rendering engine for each browser. Also, rendering engines may vary depending on the browser version. A web page is likely to render differently in different browsers. Simply said, the look of a website may become uneven across different browsers or browser versions.

To avoid these differences in the viewing experience, QAs must properly test their websites across many browsers. This will assist teams in optimizing the website’s visual experience for all major browsers and resolving rendering issues that may arise for specific browsers.

4. Functionality Testing:
This is the most basic yet crucial website QA testing step, in which a QA must fully test all UI elements while considering the most likely use case situations.

This includes validating the UI elements such as:

Forms for validating data input and logging in

• Text boxes
• CTAs
• Dropdowns
• Navigation in the header and a search box
• Spacing and Formatting

For a smaller website, manually testing the aforementioned parts may be more convenient. Comprehensive UI testing for larger websites, on the other hand, is a demanding process. Teams should use test automation technologies such as Selenium to execute automated parallel tests.

5. Link Testing:
Broken links give website users a very irritating experience, especially when trying to find important information. Moreover, broken links are bad for a website’s SEO. It goes without saying that QAs need to pay great attention to ensure that all the links point to the landing pages or documents they are meant to.

• Teams can use internet performance optimization plugins to find and repair broken links.
• After a broken link has been identified, replacing it with the proper link or a redirect is crucial so that users are sent to the correct website.
• Apart from that, QAs must ensure that the main links lead to the proper page (even if they aren’t broken). For instance, verifying that all of the header navigation links lead to the desired landing sites

6. Payment Gateways:
Digital improvements in payment exchange have made it possible for websites to take payments online. Teams must extensively test the integrations with their payment solutions provider to ensure clients do not encounter difficulties while making online payments.

An excellent technique to test this would be to make fictitious payments in a sandbox environment to test all payment methods and to have all the relevant test cases ready in advance.

7. Cookie Testing:
Text files called cookies are stored in the user’s browser. These text files include end-user data such as login credentials, cart contents, visited sites, IP addresses, etc. A website may install a cookie to remember your login session, for instance, if you check in to the website. This cookie is then utilized for various objectives, such as tailoring content for returning site users, providing tailored adverts, and so on.

To analyze the behaviour of a website with cookies enabled or deactivated, it must be tested across numerous user situations. The best approach for QAs to confirm that everything works as planned is to test the website over popular browsers in actual user situations using a real device cloud.

8. Website Security:
Websites in online business may seek personal information, particularly when creating e-commerce websites. Hence, security testing is critical to include on your QA checklist.

• Verify that the SSL certificate for your website is active to safeguard sensitive user data. This aids in the establishment of secure connections since the data is encrypted to avoid hacker threats.
• Inspect CAPTCHAs for appropriate operation.
• Major credit card companies and payment gateway integrations will demand security testing for checkout pages as a requirement.
• It is also necessary to guarantee that all HTTP traffic is forwarded to the HTTPS version of your site.

Conclusion:

Companies must understand that simply having a website is not enough to achieve success on the internet. It is also critical to undertake website QA testing to provide a smooth and bug-free customer experience for their end users, as this helps create a product’s trust in the virtual world.

The above website quality assurance checklist will assist teams in focusing on the essential areas of website QA testing to deploy resilient web apps in today’s fast-paced digital environment.

Source: This article was originally published at testgrid.io.