There are many reasons to test websites, and some of them get overlooked in the rush to launch a new site or give it a refresh.

Sometimes little or no testing is done and this can have a big impact on how well received your new website is, how successful it becomes and whether it meets the expectations you had for it.

Testing your website is vital and here are 12 good reasons why:

1. To make sure your website works

Sounds obvious but there are often simple errors that are just not picked up before a website launches or even once it has been online for a while. Broken links, images not loading, search functions not working, forms not submitting correctly are all common problems that a little testing can find and iron out.

These basic quality errors can have a big impact on your business but are generally pretty straightforward to solve.

2. To check your website displays properly in each major web browser

Keeping up to date on the latest major web browsers and versions is important, as new browsers are released regularly and other browsers gain in popularity. Browsers use different rendering engines from one another that are used to display web pages and the same page can look quite different in 2 different browsers.

A quick check of your website in each major web browser can uncover issues that may be affecting a number of users. We’ve written about browser testing before in our website audits post on breaking down browser compatibility.

3. To check your website displays properly on each major mobile device

Mobile web browsing is increasing dramatically. It is now a necessity to make sure that your website can at least be viewed correctly on the main mobile devices even if you do not have a dedicated mobile version of your site.

Having an idea of how your website displays on each major mobile device will determine whether there is more work to do in order to make your site accessible on a mobile.

4. To check that your website complies with web standards

Web standards is a subject often discussed but there are benefits to be had from getting your site to comply with them.

For one, websites that pass HTML and CSS validation are generally displayed more consistently across different web and mobile browsers. This means less browser related problems and less frustration for your users.

Passing web standards also often means a more accessible, user friendly website and one that Google prefers and so it has a greater opportunity to rank better.

5. To check that your website is accessible

Accessibility has been back in the news again recently, as the RNIB is taking BMIBaby to court over the poor accessibility of its website. Despite receiving advice from RNIB on the issues that users were experiencing with the BMIBaby website, not enough progress has been made to make the website accessible to those using a screen reader or who are unable to use a mouse.

There are many tools to help with accessibility testing but you should also try using your website without a mouse, or with a screen reader or text browser to see if you can still carry out the actions that you expect. We covered auditing your website’s accessibility last year.

6. To test and monitor your website’s performance

We know that users do not like slow websites. We also know that Google isn’t keen on slow websites. Therefore, it makes sense to invest a bit of time and effort to check your website’s performance.

Your website’s performance isn’t just down to your hosting company. The way your website is coded, the graphics used and a number of other factors can all help to increase load times and slow your website down.

Running some performance checks can identify where precious seconds can be saved and give your users a better experience. Here are 13 website performance testing tools to get you started.

7. To gain important feedback on what users think of your website

Users are what websites are designed for. So gaining feedback from your target audience is vital for a successful website. Testing your users can find out what they like and what they find frustrating or even impossible regarding your website.

As few as 5 users can identify severe issues that, once overcome, will provide an improvement for your users and allow them to complete the actions that were frustrating them previously. You can start a user experience test straightaway with WhatUsersDo, a UK based usability testing firm.

8. To work out what converts mere visitors into something more

A common aspect of website testing is trying to improve your conversion rates through A/B or multivariate testing, which aims to gain more sales or enquiries from the same number of visitors.

This is achieved by testing different versions of your landing pages to determine which one converts best and then going with that version.

Regular testing of different promotions, button styles, page layouts, copy, images, forms with less fields, etc. can improve your conversion rates and help you to achieve more out of the same visitor levels.

9. To make sure your website’s SEO is correct

Issues for SEO can easily be introduced to a website without you realising. You can break links, create duplicate content, set up new pages without writing individual page titles, not update your site map and a number of other hidden problems. These only become apparent when you start to lose visitors to your site.

A regular check of all the main SEO aspects will keep everything ticking over and ensure search engines still appreciate your website.

10. To check that your Google Analytics is installed correctly

An installation of Google Analytics can often not be carried out correctly. Sometimes the code is missing from certain pages or cross domain problems are not dealt with properly. This can result in page views being inflated or deflated or bounce stats being incorrect.

An audit of your Google Analytics can uncover these problems so that you can ensure you are measuring your visitor statistics correctly.

11. To make sure there are no spelling or grammar errors

Nobody likes spelling errors when viewing a website, even minor ones. But when you’ve read every word on every page of your own site it can be hard to see the wood for the trees.

A regular spelling and grammar check across the whole of your website helps to eradicate any errors that creep in from time to time and make sure everything is double checked.

12. To ensure your website is secure

There are many unscrupulous individuals out there who like nothing more than exploiting your website by trying different ways to hack into it. They want to use your website or server for nefarious activities such as gaining access to your data or adding in code to your website to distribute viruses, link to other sites or even replace your site with their own (note – it will probably be a dodgy website).

Whether the method used is SQL injection or a cross site scripting attack it is worth a regular vulnerability scan to make sure you are not leaving yourself open to any such unsavoury behaviour.

Bonus Reason – To Make Your Website Work Better For You

By regularly testing all of the above aspects you can be confident that many of the areas that cause problems are being taken care of.

Testing and fixing issues improves the user experience and can be beneficial for your SEO, site performance and conversion rate, as well as complying with legislation, standards and making sure your site doesn’t get hacked into.

Overall, testing these aspects will make your website work better for your business.

Image used courtesy of Leo Reynolds

Within the video, Matt Cutts explains that around 1 out of 100 searches carried out on Google are affected by slow page speed and this amounts to roughly 1 in every 1000 websites that have an issue with site speed.

If your website is slow then Google isn’t the only one who will potentially penalise it, as your site visitors are unlikely to wait around either, which will directly affect the number of enquiries or sales that you receive.

A quick test using a free tool such as Web Page Test will highlight if you have an issue and ongoing monitoring can alert you when your site slows down.

Here is the Matt Cutts video in full.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO4YuDAkplU

But as you can tell, that’s not the subject of this blog post. Website monitoring is the topic and I don’t mean the boring kind that pings your site every 5 minutes and alerts you if it is down, although it is definitely worthwhile to have at least some kind of monitoring in place.

It gets much more interesting than a straightforward ping or http monitor, as site monitoring can keep tabs on a lot more than just the odd bit of downtime.

First of all, we’ll go through the whys and wherefores of monitoring your website’s availability before we move onto the more juicy aspects including real browser monitoring, multi-step functionality testing and vulnerability scanning, which we’ll save for later posts.

Why Monitor Websites At All?

So why is it a good idea to monitor your website’s uptime?

• To understand if and when your website suffers outages and goes down
• To keep a record of how long your website is down for
• Downtime means visitors cannot reach your website and therefore you’ll receive no enquiries or sales
• There may be a longer term impact, as visitors may decide not to come back or dissuade other people from visiting your website
• Extended downtime can lead to a loss of search engine optimisation performance
• Without website monitoring you will not be aware of these problems

If you sell from your website then you will probably have a good idea of how many sales you make in a typical day. Think what would happen if your website did suffer an outage and was down for a whole day, how many sales would you lose?

By monitoring your website you build up a picture of how often your website suffers from an outage, how long it is down for and what impact that could have on your business.

But My Hosting Provider Guarantees Uptime

Monitoring your website is a very good idea even if your hosting provider guarantees 99.9% uptime, as many of them do. What the hosting provider is guaranteeing is that the servers your website is hosted on will be maintained and monitored to ensure that they remain active and accessible for 99.9% of the time (usually not including any scheduled maintenance).

However, what those guarantees do not include is whether your individual website is functioning correctly all that time. More sophisticated websites will utilise a number of technologies including databases, content management systems, payment gateways, video servers, etc. and a particular aspect of the website can have a problem that causes it not to function properly or at all.

If it is the payment gateway that stops working then the whole of your website may function 100% correctly until the point at which the website requires your prospective customer to submit their payment details. The website grinds to a halt at this point when it tries to contact the payment gateway and the payment server doesn’t respond.

What will happen is that you won’t get a new customer, as they can’t proceed with their purchase. They may contact you about the problem they had or they may not and so you could be left in the dark about what is happening on your website. What is even worse is that the prospective customer leaves unhappy and may tell other people about their poor experience.

In this situation, your hosting provider will tell you everything is working, and basic website monitoring that pings your website every 5 minutes will say that your site is working too. Technically, they are both correct but neither pinpoints the problem.

How To Be Notified When Problems Occur

If you own or manage an ecommerce website or a website that has important aspects such as being able to login to a members area, signup to a newsletter, register for an event or carry out a site search then more advanced site monitoring is recommended.

In the next blog post I’ll cover some of the more advanced features to expect from monitoring that will notify you when serious issues occur that you would otherwise be unaware of.

This post is the 4th in the series, we focused on functionality the first time around, then checked our browser compatibility before going onto uncover usability issues.

Auditing your website’s accessibility is an important step that should not be overlooked, an accessible website has many benefits and the focus should not be to just ensure the site passes automated accessibility tests.

We’ll look at what can be done to check how accessible your website is but first here are the main benefits of having an accessible website.

Benefits of an accessible website

• Widen your audience – this quote was gained via an Econsultancy blog post from December 2010, ‘according a recent Guardian report, 36% of the 9 million disabled people in the UK are regularly online’. That’s 3,240,000 people, a sizeable number on its own but that does not take into account an even larger number of people not even classified as being disabled. They will benefit from accessibility improvements you can make too.
• Conform to standards, best practice and the law – by complying with web standards and guidelines such as W3C’s WCAG 2.0, Section 508 in the US, PAS 78 ‘Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites’ and BS 8878:2010 ‘Web accessibility: code of practice’, you are not only staying on the correct legal side but code that is well structured and complies with standards tends to have less compatibility issues, offers quicker page load time and is overall better quality.
• Improves SEO – by implementing accessibility improvements such as adding alternative text to images, making page titles, descriptions and headings more meaningful, minimising the use of flash and JavaScript, describing link text fully and organising the structure of the site will benefit your SEO in addition to helping your users.
• Improves usability – you will see from the rest of this post that implementing many of the accessibility improvements will actually make your website more usable for general users not just those with disabilities or particular requirements.

Those are just the main benefits and they seem pretty good reasons to at least audit your accessibility and see whether your website needs some treatment or not.

Straightforward accessibility checks

You can quickly check whether your site complies with accessibility standards by running your website through the following free accessibility testing tools:

• Truwex Online – checks your website’s accessibility against Section 508, WCAG 1.0 and WCAG 2.0 standards.
• Colorblind Filter – checks how your website is viewed by users with different types of colour blindness.
• AChecker – gives you a report checking your site for known problems, likely problems and potential problems. Checks against all the main guidelines and also validates your HTML and CSS.

But be careful, using these accessibility tools is useful but only gives you part of the story. The nature of many people’s disabilities is that just applying what the accessibility checks tells you to do will not necessarily enable them to use your website successfully.

For that, you need to do some manual accessibility testing.

Manual accessibility testing

Full accessibility testing is actually concerned with a range of disabilities and a series of manual checks or tests should form part of any website audit.

Using the website with software used by those with a disability will mean that further issues are found than with automated accessibility tests.

Here are some software suggestions for visual impairment, try using your website with each piece of software:

• Blindness – screen reader software such as Thunder or JAWS and text browsers such as Lynx.
• Low vision – screen magnification software such as MAGic.

Other disabilities require awareness of what barriers those users may encounter in using your website, such as the following:

• Colour blindness – many websites use text that is very similar to background colours and so does not provide enough contract for people with colour blindness to read properly.
• Deafness – audio or video should have transcripts available and pages with large amounts of text need related imagery to help understanding of the content for those whose first language may be sign language.
• Motor disabilities – main input device may be a specialised mouse or keyboard and so having keyboard alternatives to navigate through the site and forms that can be tabbed through in field order is very helpful for those users.
• Neurological disabilities including attention deficit disorder, learning disabilities and memory impairments mean that clear and consistent organisation of your website is very important.

As you review your website for accessibility, it is good to keep the above items in mind and determine whether your website needs improving or reorganising. I think that the above list shows that making accessibility improvements helps all users, not just those with that particular disability. For instance, a clearly organised and consistent website will help everybody, as would having a navigation structure and forms that can be used with a keyboard and not relying on a mouse.

Audit accessibility regularly

As with most aspects of a website audit, it is important to check the accessibility of your website regularly. As new content is added to your site or further developments are launched you need to ensure that it remains accessible for as many users as possible.

Key Points

• The benefits of having an accessible website are varied and wide ranging, it is not just a case of complying with legislation.
• There are several free accessibility testing tools to help you audit your site but do not rely on them totally.
• Manual accessibility testing is important to become aware of what barriers users may encounter in using your website.
• As with most aspects of a website audit, it is important to audit your site’s accessibility regularly.

Your feedback is greatly appreciated on this blog post, let us know what you think about auditing the accessibility of your website in the comments.

In the last post we were breaking down browser compatibility and our first post in the series focused on functionality.

An unusable website or one with poor usability is not much good to anyone, especially you as the site owner or manager. In fact, issues with the usability of your website can mean that users don’t buy from you, don’t come back to your site or recommend you to others. Problems with your website’s usability can even have a negative impact on the perception of your organisation as a whole, extending further than just the website.

So how do you go about assessing the usability of your website to make sure it is not turning potential customers away? Here are some suggestions:

Review your website from a user’s point of view

Put yourself in their shoes, enter the website with the mindset of wanting to find out about your company or view information on a particular product, find out how much it is, what the shipping costs are, how to return the product if it is not what you wanted, etc.

Ask yourself simple questions whilst you review the website, you can break them down into different areas such as:

• Overall Appearance – does the design work well or is it confusing? Are all the graphics necessary or are they overpowering? Do you know where to click or what to do?
• Navigation – can you see how to get to where you want to go? Do you get lost or is it easy to find your way around? Can you easily get back to the home page? Can you use a search for what you need? Does it return relevant results?
• Content – does the content on each page make sense? Is it well written relevant? Does it have any spelling mistakes? Does it compel you to do something? Can you find the details you are looking for, i.e. company information, contact details, etc? Is it kept up to date?

There are many more items that you could check for each usability audit but the above sections and example questions you could ask yourself whilst reviewing the website should give you a good start.

Sit with someone whilst they use your website

A good way of getting some instant feedback is to sit down with a colleague, friend or family member, preferable somebody who hasn’t seen your website before, and ask them to use the website whilst you watch what they do.

Whilst making notes on areas that your usability tester finds difficult, you can ask them certain questions on their experience of the site or set certain tasks such as finding specific product information, submit an enquiry, find out what our fax number is or download one of our white papers.

You will certainly find out first hand what barriers exist and areas that can be improved.

User testing

User testing is a relatively inexpensive way of picking up on usability issues by having a number of people, armed with webcams and microphones, try to use your website and carry out certain tasks that you set for them.

Services such as WhatUsersDo, UserTesting.com and OpenHallway enable you to set your tasks, select how many users (in the case of OpenHallway you have to supply your own users) and sit back whilst the users carry out the tasks whilst recording their thoughts and findings as they do so.

The users may not be your specific target market and it will depend on what tasks or questions you set for them to perform as to the results you get. Some analysis is required in order to establish the next steps or improvements that are required but user testing can be a great and comparatively cheap way to obtain solid feedback from real users reviewing your website.

Other usability testing tools

There are many other usability testing tool that can give you an idea of how people are using your website and the kind of difficulties that they come across. Over on our Testing Web Sites blog, we have a directory of over 50 usability testing tools including heat-mapping, click-tracking, eye-tracking, online surveys and web analytics tools that can help you identify or find out about usability issues.

Read up on usability

If you are really not sure what you should be looking for when reviewing your website’s usability then there are several good books available that will help you understand the main principles.

The main book, which is a must read and helps make usability seem very straightforward is Steve Krug’s ‘Don’t Make Me Think – A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability’. His more recent book is called ‘Rocket Surgery Made Easy – The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems’ written in a similar straightforward and easy to understand style.

Usability conventions and best practice

As the Internet matures, there has emerged a series of conventions that accumulate to form usability best practice for a variety of website scenarios. An organisation such as Econsultancy is a good place to start in order to find best practice on implementing a shopping basket and checkout system or product pages or mobile sites.

These best practice guides contain lots of information but there are many usability conventions to keep in mind such as:

• Your logo is generally positioned in the top left corner. Clicking on the logo on any page will take the user back to the home page.
• Make sure that the colour of links used throughout your website is consistent and stand out so that users can easily determine what is a link and what is not.
• The main navigation should be placed in the same position on each page of the website so that users can easily access the main sections of the website.
• Content should be kept up to date, be free of any mistakes or typos and there should be no ‘under construction’ pages or content areas.
• It should be easy to reach company information and contact details throughout the website

Audit usability regularly

Hopefully this blog post has given you some guidance on performing an audit of your website’s usability. Assessing usability, improving usability issues and measuring the results is an ongoing process and therefore a usability audit is something that should be carried out regularly.

Key points

• Review your website from a user’s point of view. Don’t assume that users know what they are looking for and how to reach it when they first come into contact with your website.
• User testing is a good and relatively inexpensive way of getting feedback.
• Read up on usability – there are many good books available on the subject.
• Observe conventions and best practice – if the majority of websites put their logo in the top left and clicking on it always takes the user back to the home page then this is a convention that you should follow.
• Improving usability is a continual process – assess, take action and measure the results before doing it all again.

Your feedback is greatly appreciated on this blog post, let me know what you think about auditing the usability of your website in the comments.

The first post in this series focused on functionality, expressing how users hate errors and will abandon purchases if they encounter problems.

Browser compatibility testing or browser checking is a logical next step when auditing your website and involves testing your website thoroughly to make sure it displays and works correctly in all of the main web browsers that people use to visit your website.

This browser testing is vital, as websites can display very differently from browser to browser and mean that a user could have an entirely different experience if they use one browser (where the website works), over another browser (where the website does not work).

The same testing should be carried out on each main web browser and so this aspect can be very time consuming, as you are essentially testing your website several times to check it in each browser.

What Are The Main Web Browsers?

We test websites in each of the following browsers as standard although other specific browsers are available on request.

• Internet Explorer 7 (on PC)
• Internet Explorer 8 (on PC)
• Firefox 3.6 (on PC and Mac)
• Google Chrome 8 (on PC and Mac)
• Safari 5 (on Mac)

If you are not sure what web browsers you should include as part of your testing then have a look at your analytics to find out which web browsers are used by visitors arriving at your website.

An important point to note is to be aware of new web browsers, new versions of browsers and browsers gaining market share. A lot of people were caught out by Google’s Chrome web browser gaining so much market share in the last 12 months as many websites did not work correctly and had not been tested in this relatively new browser.

Econsultancy reported on this in September last year with the launch of a new ecommerce site for Zara where unfortunately the development company forgot to test the website in Google Chrome.

In our Testing Web Sites blog, we had highlighted the very same issue just 2 weeks earlier to ask ‘Are You Testing With Google Chrome?’

Similarly, Internet Explorer 9 is currently available as a public beta version and will be fully released shortly. Your website will need to be retested in this new version of Internet Explorer to ensure it works and displays as intended. IE9 will be added to our main browser list as soon as its market share starts to increase.

A resource such as the Browser Statistics from W3Schools will help you to keep updated on the latest browser usage trends.

Common Browser Related Problems

The type of browser related issues found can vary from extremely serious issues that mean the web page cannot be displayed at all or affect the website in such a way that using it is impossible, to more minor problems that show an image out of place or not loading in correctly.

We have found issues where the whole navigation of a website did not display in Firefox and so the visitor could not get past the home page, or product images disappeared when you moved your mouse over them in Internet Explore 8. These are just 2 examples of countless browser related issues we have found in the past.

A thorough audit of the website in each main web browser means testing the site a further 5 times but is guaranteed to pick up browser issues that will improve the quality of the website for your visitors.

If you do not test in a particular major web browser then you run the risk of the website not working correctly for the visitors that use that browser. For a web browser such as Google Chrome 8 that corresponds to over 16% of the visitors arriving at your website (your own website usage may vary). I don’t think any website could allow 16% of its visitors to have a poor experience through not checking the site properly over in a particular browser.

Browser Testing Tools

Whilst browser checking is essentially a manual task there are a number of tools available to help us test and make life a little bit easier.

In our Testing Web Sites blog we maintain a list of browser testing tools and they essentially fall into 2 camps – those that allow ‘live’ testing using that browser and those that give you a screenshot of your website on each browser.

The tools that give you a screenshot, such as Browsershots, are good to test the layout of each page but you will need a testing tool such as Cross Browser Testing to test your website live and be able to check elements such as drop down menus, overlays, moving between pages and anything that uses JavaScript or AJAX or Flash.

The alternative to using tools like those described above is to set up your own ‘testing lab’ and cover all the operating system and browser versions yourself. We have machines that cover all the main browsers and operating systems we test on including IE7, IE8, Google Chrome and Firefox 3.6 on Windows Vista and Windows 7 plus Firefox 3.6, Google Chrome and Safari 5 on Mac OSX. For any other web browsers that we require we use tools such as those above.

Audit Browser Compatibility Regularly

As new browsers are released or as updates are carried out to your website, you do need to check your website regularly to make sure there are no browser compatibility problems.

This can be completed alongside auditing the functionality of your website, where our recommendation would be that if your website is undergoing site developments on a frequent basis then some browser testing every 3 or 6 months, in addition to the site updates being fully tested, would be suitable.

Key Points

• Browser testing is vital to pick up potentially serious issues affecting your site visitors
• Check your website thoroughly in each of the main web browsers
• Be aware of new web browsers being released, retest your website in browsers gaining market share
• For any web browsers that you do not have access to, there are browser testing tools that can help
• Regularly check your browser compatibility – around every 6 months is recommended

Your feedback is greatly appreciated, let me know what you think about checking the browser compatibility of your website in the comments.

Website Functionality

The functionality of a website is how it works or how it functions. A website’s functionality can be straightforward and simple, you click on a link and view a page, which leads to another page containing a form where you can submit an enquiry to the organisation whose site you are on.

From there websites can get a whole lot more complicated, containing hundreds or even thousands of pages, incorporating a site search, ecommerce with payment integration, full content management systems and specific functionality that may not be readily apparent when viewing the website as a normal user.

Users Hate Errors

Recent research earlier this month carried out by Tealeaf and covered by Econsultancy found that 45% of those who shopped online encountered website problems while doing their Christmas shopping, and 32% abandoned purchases as a result.

So if 1 in 3 users are prepared to forget purchasing from your website if they encounter a problem with your website then it is vitally important to iron as many out as possible.

Start by browsing the website, think about how the website appears to someone new to it that has never seen the site or visited it before. Keep this in mind at all times when testing or auditing your website, we will cover usability and user testing later in this series but it is important to always have the user in mind, you will pick up a lot more issues and the website will be better for it.

Just by generally browsing the website you will start to put a list of items together but go into more detail, check each page or at least section page thoroughly to look for errors and other issues. When you do your second page, concentrate on the home page first, then each main page or perhaps go through each page in order of most visited. If the website is large then think about the different types of pages or templates there are and check one of each type of template thoroughly to look for bugs. Remember, it is functionality we are auditing and so it is not so vital to check the text, images or carry out any browser checking at this stage.

For any specific functionality, such as a shopping system, site search or any custom functionality then spend extra time on these aspects to thoroughly test for problems.

Most of this work involves manually browsing the website, clicking on each link, moving from page to page, trying every combination depending on what functionality you are auditing.

Automated Tools

Automated tools can help such as broken link checkers and other scanning tools. However, understanding of how the website should work and where pages should link needs to be applied by a real person. In this way, automated tools can point the way to a problem but then further investigation and detailed testing needs to be carried out in order to follow up on what the scanning tool or link checker found.

Usually, the best way is to start by manually checking through the website and then use a link checker or scanning software to scan each page or link and find any further issues.

Finding Errors

Errors found can range from simple problems such as an image not loading in or a link not taking you to the correct page to serious issues such as a shopping basket not adding up the total correctly or integration with payment providers not working.

Basic errors affect site quality and can negatively impact user’s perception of the website and therefore your organisation. If you only find basic functionality errors when carrying out a website audit then the process has been successful and you can gain peace of mind that the website is working as intended.

More serious issues can directly impact revenue obtained from the website either in product purchases or sales enquiries as well as affect how the user perceives your organisation. A detailed website audit will find these issues so that they can be put right.

Audit Functionality Regularly

A regular review of your website will make sure it continues to operate as it should. Ongoing developer or site updates can affect previously tested functionality and have an impact that does not get picked up at the time. Regularly checking your website and carrying out a similar website audit will help to keep the site working correctly for each user that views it.

If your website is undergoing site developments on a frequent basis then an audit every 3 or 6 months, in addition to the site updates being fully tested, would be suitable.

Key Points

• Start by browsing the website – think from the point of view of the user
• Then go into more detail – spend time testing the home page and main pages
• Extra time should be spent checking custom or more complicated functionality
• Don’t rely on automated tools
• Perform an audit regularly

Your feedback is greatly appreciated, let me know what you think about auditing website functionality in the comments.

Just in case you hadn’t noticed or were trying to avoid it, the buildup to Christmas is in full swing. Trees and decorations are going up in the high street, Christmas advertising is on the telly and most things will start to be accompanied with a sprig of holly, a dusting of fake snow and a mince pie.

November is often the month where website owners and managers dress the homepage of their website with the aforementioned sprig of holly and extend their seasonal good wishes. Somehow, this visual update will impress upon the visitor that Christmas is upon us and compel them to make more purchases.

I actually don’t mind the little snowmen standing next to the logo or the snowflakes, baubles and tinsel that start to adorn many a homepage at this time of the year.

But whilst you are planning these seasonal updates to spruce up your website it makes sense to carry out a thorough audit of the site at the same time.

What good is a website audit at Christmas time?

Reviewing your website regularly is generally a good idea and becomes even more important immediately prior to many website’s busiest time of the year.

Throughout the year, most websites will have had some work done, perhaps to refresh the design, extend functionality, add new sections or improve SEO. These projects are often considered individually and the website is not retested in its entirety each time updates to the site are carried out.

Additionally, taking a bit of time to review your checkout process, product pages and other central aspects is vital to pick up issues that may be affecting your sales. Quick wins to improve usability can often be found that could lead to increased sales.

Carrying out a detailed website audit will provide invaluable feedback of your entire website, finding bugs and issues plus identifying areas that can be improved so you can maximise your site’s potential until the last sales day before Christmas.

What does a website audit cover?

Having someone external to your business review the website provides feedback that may not otherwise be picked up due to a certain blindness that can develop from being close to a project.

An audit should cover, but does not have to be limited to, the following main areas:

1. Functional – there can be some big errors hiding just under the surface of your website. Broken links, scripts not working, images not displaying, functionality not at 100%, waiting to be discovered. These issues can be caused by previous sets of updates or work carried out that has then not been tested fully or not checked in relation to other functionality within the website.

A website audit will review all the main aspects of the website and go through the site in detail to pick up as many bugs and issues as possible. These items are then prioritised so that the most important can be fixed and keep the sales ticking over.

2. Browser Compatibility – in a similar way to the functionality testing, browser layout problems and functionality issues in different web browsers can crop up that may be rendering your website unusable in certain browsers.

As new web browsers are released then certain areas of your website may not display correctly in the new browser. An example of this is the usage of Google Chrome increasing dramatically throughout 2010, which has caught many website owners and developers out as high profile sites had not been tested sufficiently in this web browser.

Reviewing your website in each major web browser will find any browser related layout and functionality issues that can then be prioritised alongside other issues and fixed.

3. Performance – in the period before Christmas you want to be sure that your website is not going to suffer from any performance issues. Even identifying a handful of performance improvements can make a noticeable difference to page load speeds, which will mean more visitors staying with you through to the checkout page.

The website audit will review the current performance and make recommendations on the items that will make the biggest difference to reduce page load times.

4. Usability – a fresh look at your website will often pick out usability aspects that can be improved and have a positive impact on sales due to customers being able to use your website more easily.

As part of the audit, we will identify any areas that we found difficult to use or confusing and put forward suggested solutions and improvements.

5. Web Standards – for websites that advertise that they comply with web standards including accessibility, HTML, CSS it is important that they continue to pass these standards.

The website audit will check that the website complies with each web standard.

6. SEO – search engines are the lifeblood of many websites, a problem could be catastrophic in the approach to the festive season. By the time falling visitor numbers are spotted it may be too late to identify the issues and put them right.

Checks are completed across all the main SEO aspects to ensure that everything is in its place.

Website Audit Priorities

At this time of the year, the priorities will be to tackle any critical issues as soon as possible and then be confident that all the most important aspects have been dealt with.

The less important items can be picked up again after Christmas and completed as part of a New Year cleanup once the rush dies down.

We record all items in our bug tracking system, prioritised with critical issues first, so that you can feed your developers the most important items to work on straightaway before returning later to deal with medium and low priorities.

For consumer sites there is still time to review your website and tackle any issues that might hinder your sales during the busiest time of the year.

For business to business firms that are not so busy at this time of year it is the perfect opportunity to check over the website in detail and fix any problems before busier times ahead.

Before the Christmas rush really takes off, carry out a thorough website audit of your website site to uncover issues that will impact on your sales. Be confident that your website is ready.

Contact us to book your website audit.

Strictly speaking, all the testing should be been done before launch but agencies and freelance web developers are often under pressure to get websites finished and live sometimes prematurely.

This means that the reviews I complete usually do result in a number of issues being found, including some fairly major ones alongside the typos and small layout bugs in different browsers.

Higher priority bug examples include one site where the main navigation was completely broken in a particular major browser and so the site was unusable. On another website a large special offer graphic was still linking to the test site instead of the live site and third website had a member login page with no sign of username and password fields being displayed.

These examples were from reputable websites produced by companies and agencies who turn out good quality websites on a regular basis.

This is aside from the findings of Econsultancy recently where they discovered the newly launched Zara website to be totally broken in Google Chrome.

The bugs were fixed pretty quickly by Zara’s agency but a lot of discussion went around the Internet covering the website’s problems, which I’m sure Zara could have done without.

Pressure To Launch

I completely sympathise with digital agencies, freelance web developers and anyone else who produces websites. They are often under a severe amount of pressure to launch those sites on time and development can go right up to the wire, which squeezes the amount of testing time available.

This sympathy comes from being on the front line myself, managing fairly large website builds and I know what can happen when you are trying to get a website out the door.

The pressure to launch and the time available for testing often result in a website seeing the light of day perhaps a little too early.

Practically every website I’ve reviewed has had several bugs that needed attention with many websites having more severe issues including the examples described above.

Help Is At Hand

For those web professionals that need help either because they do not have the time available or because they need someone outside of the project due to becoming blind to issues then help is available.

A Free Trial

Update – we have temporarily discontinued the free website analysis, whilst we get through a backlog of work. The free trial will be resumed again shortly.

I would like to offer a free trial. This trial means that I will spend 30 minutes testing a website that you have produced and will then send you a list of issues that I find.

Typically, from the reviews that I have completed recently, 30 minutes testing time will result in anything from 2 or 3 bugs up to 12 or 15 issues being found. And, as we have already covered, some of those could be serious and actually be costing the business in question money.

As a final example for what a free trial can throw up, a website I was reviewing today had a contact form, which I filled in and found that the email address that the contact form was sending enquiries to was bouncing, as the email address was invalid. Imagine if this was your website or one of your client’s websites, not getting website enquiries due to the form not being tested.

Sign Up

You can sign up for the free trial below and there is obligation to continue using WebDepend afterwards. Plus, the trial is free and I will not pass your details onto anyone else or divulge any issues that I find to anybody else. There is 1 free trial per organisation.

Website Review

I am finding that having a person such as myself with no prior knowledge of the website, who will approach the website from a different angle, and test it thoroughly in an organised, methodical and detailed fashion, will turn up bugs and issues that may otherwise not be found.

Additionally, carrying out this final testing on your behalf, with experience and understanding of what to look out for, allows you to get on with whatever else you need to do – designing, building, project management or discussing the next piece of work with the client.

This testing need not be expensive either, a small straightforward website can be tested in a couple of hours including functional testing, browser compatibility testing and some key usability, accessibility and search engine optimisation points. Large, content managed and ecommerce sites take longer, as they are naturally more complex but we can still get through them fairly quickly and the testing is extremely cost effective when faced with issues that prevent somebody ordering a product or making an enquiry.

If you would like to find out more about our website testing services then please contact us for further details. Or, why not give us a go and submit your website to our free trial.

There are so many things that can go wrong, and will if they are given the chance – from small typos and grammar mistakes in the copy to broken images and links, layout problems in various web browsers and functionality either not working or not working very well.

Problems can range from being mildly annoying and a little bit frustrating to actually preventing the user from purchasing a product, finding out information about a product or service or making an enquiry.

User Experience

All issues, even the small ones, can detract from an otherwise positive experience, which can have the knock on effect of making the user feel less positive about the company whose website they were viewing.

So our job is to make sure that users have the best possible experience that they can when they view the website we have project managed or produced.

This includes picking up on all site quality issues starting with any priority or big issues and working our way down to the smaller and less obvious or important items.

User experience and usability testing goes into a huge area in its own right but there is still enough to concern ourselves with ensuring the quality of what is produced is as good as it can be.

Browser Testing

The job of quality control would be made easier if visitors arrived at the website under the same set of circumstances as every other visitor, but they don’t.

Visitors use a wide variety of different web browsers on different operating systems using different computers with different resolutions and software installed accessing your website at different broadband speeds creating a huge number of configurations.

In an ideal world, each configuration should be tested so that you can be confident that a user that has a particular combination of browser, operating system, resolution, Internet speed and software installed is able to view and use your website correctly.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in an ideal world and it is not feasible to test in every browser and operating system combination, as the time required is not available to most project managers or website owners.

A good quality website will display and work correctly in all the main web browsers.

Accessibility

Additionally, we can’t forget about those visitors that have special requirements – I’m talking about accessibility – which means that those using text browsers, screen readers, different input devices, etc. are also able to use your website effectively.

A minimum accessibility level is a requirement for all websites and the best quality websites will provide the most accessible website that they can.

Website Performance

A slow website is extremely frustrating for even the most patient of website visitor, and most of us are not patient website visitors.

Performance testing will highlight bottlenecks and show where code needs to be improved or optimised that causes the website to slow down. It could be that the site search takes a long time to display results or that there are too many database connections each time a page loads, which causes the site to slow or stop working altogether.

A top quality website will address these issues so that the user is able to view a responsive website and not a site that suffers from repeated slowdowns.

A Few Areas to Test

In this post I’ve highlighted just a few areas that should be tested regularly for any website, from straightforward copy mistakes and broken links through browser checking and accessibility to performance testing.

Successfully testing each of these areas will improve the quality of the website that you are producing or managing and we owe it to users to give them the best possible experience.

In my view that means no typos, no broken links, no areas of the site that don’t work and a whole lot more besides.

Striving for the best quality is not going to be easy, and I will follow up on this post with some hints and tips to help your quality testing.

Lessons Learned

• Our job is to give users the best possible experience when they view our website.
• A poor experience can make a user feel less positive about the company or brand.
• Browser checking is necessary, as users do not all have the same browser and operating system combination.
• An accessible website is a requirement.
• Users do not like slow websites and will click away if a page takes too long to load.
• Striving for the best quality is not easy – look out for some hints and tips coming soon.

Contact WebDepend

If you are interested in what WebDepend can do for your business, including our website testing and auditing services then please contact us, we would be happy to hear from you.


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