Website Testing: A Detailed Guide

What are the challenges faced in website testing?

Website testing comes up with its challenges that businesses need to consider. Let’s take a look at the top ones among them:

• Firewall interaction
  You’ll face several instances where a port or a firewall can block a website since it has issues regarding security certificates. You must test your application across different firewalls to stay safe from such incidents.
• Web Services validation
  Modern-day web applications depend thoroughly upon the web service layers such as XML/SOAP or REST/JSON for exchanging data between different applications or systems. Hence there is a huge scope to test all these applications. To test these web services, you must pick the right tool from your web testing tools.
• Consistency maintenance across different browsers
  Majority of the users prefer reliable, flexible, and interactive web apps. If a user comes across any inconsistency when they surf on browsers, it becomes a huge headache for enterprises. When you perform usability testing, your developer has to monitor the scalability and interactivity of your application across various browsers through different hardware.

When I conducted a LinkedIn poll asking the biggest expectation people have when they visit any website, out of 174 people, 53% of them indicated user-friendly UI/UX on the web. Nobody wants to spend time on a crumpled website with zig-zag text and images. Developers and testers need to take special care of this matter.


• Overcoming performance issues
  Your website should load fast- That’s what people expect next to a user-friendly experience. This is also one of the primary goals of website testing. I realized this from the results I achieved from the poll. To overcome this challenge, testers must keenly focus on performance testing with interoperability, extended application, and integration issues.
• Security threats
  We live in times where digitization has become the norm. We are witnessing an overwhelming rate of cyberattacks. To avoid data breaches and information loss, we must regulate how we conduct security testing. This can help you out when you want to avoid security issues regarding DDoS attacks along with cyber attacks.

Best Websites and web app testing practices

Before we understand the best website testing practices, let’s touch base with the basics. This is the structure of a web application:

The architecture of a web application would describe different interactions between databases, applications, and middleware systems. This is done to make sure that different apps function on a simultaneous basis. Before we open a web page, we type the URL of the website in the web browser’s address bar. The server would send many files to the browser in response to your request. After that, the user would be able to carry out web interactions. The functioning of a web app is quite similar.

When we deal with any web application, it involves different codes or sub-programs that run parallelly. These are

• Client-side Code – The browser-side code that responds to a few user inputs.
• Server-side Code – The server-side code that responds directly to the HTTP requests.

The architecture of a web application is vital in modern days since a vast portion of the network traffic globally, along with devices and apps, leverages web-oriented communication. The web app architecture should inevitably deal with factors such as scalability, efficiency, robustness, security, and reliability. That’s where website testing software comes into the picture.

Website testing is going to grow from strength to strength with these industry-led practices. It’s apparent that your website audience would eulogize you if you follow these practices:

• Everything starts with Documentation
  During website testing and web app testing, the tester shouldn’t ignore the importance of documentation. After doing a clear study, they need to document the needed facts in requirements, test cases, test plan, and traceability matrix. Your document would act as a source of truth. Hence you need to be careful when you write it.
• Check for Website Functionality
  Automated functionality testing is one of the top testing processes to test how the website or web app would sync up with pre-set requirements. It’s all about using black-box testing techniques when a tester wouldn’t be aware of the internal system logic. This also includes validation, links/URL, cookies, and error message testing. You must thoroughly analyze and perform all these tests using the right tool and team.
• Leverage Cross Browser Compatibility
  With thousands of users accessing websites and web apps on their tablets and mobile phones, enterprises have found a symphony of features and options to impress their audience. Cross browser compatibility tests want to do what Silicon valley did to budding startups in the 1970s and 80s to your websites and web apps. Cross browser compatibility test during website testing aims to make your website responsive.

With responsive web design, you can ensure mobile-friendly and user-friendly applications that work amazingly on every browser, OS, and device. While developers slay it with responsive websites to ensure that the websites and web apps are accessible on different web browser versions, testers can perform cross browser compatibility tests to ensure they are on track.

Learn how to deal with responsive testing with TestMu AI.

• Conduct Performance Testing under different conditions
  An application shouldn’t crash when put under heavy loads. It should work like a pro on every browser and device. But, alas! A minor design or coding flaw is all it takes to affect the performance of the website on a negative note. Hence you need to perform load testing and check how your website performs under different loads. Get your fingers on the pulse with the best automation load testing tools in the market.
• Choose the top parameters for Usability testing
  Usability testing and user experience go hand in hand when you want to engage your audience, leads, and visitors and eventually convert them into clients and customers. Evaluating the application’s usability on important parameters such as speed, content readability, accessibility, navigability, and UI design is of utmost importance.
• Make use of Geolocation testing
  The web is a global, universal platform where a user from the USA can read a blog from an Armenian website. Hence, it’s always better to test your website’s appearance under different geo-locations. Geolocation testing can also be a secret sauce for nailing SEO aspects since you can easily resolve any bug in the website version of a particular nation on time.
• Kickstart Interface testing
  The method of interface testing confirms that these three major web application components are running perfectly fine- database, web browser, and the web server. We use this testing to check for any interruption when transferring the data. When we do this, we can check if we can check the communication happening between different interfaces. Check out our list of the best UI testing tools and techniques in the market.
• Check for Security Issues
  It’s a recipe for disaster when you ignore the red flags of web security. A single vulnerability can translate to a high-end data breach, well enough to bring down the big giants to mud. This can lead to a misbalance in morale along with financial consequences. People would lose their trust in your brand eventually.

Hence it’s a must to test your web apps and websites concerning security. Define your quality controls and coding standards. Bring in a cross-functional approach to building policies. Come up with strategies to face both internal as well as external challenges. Keep up with industry standards. Use them as benchmarks during website testing.

• Avoid skipping confirmation test
  We can always perform change-related testing for tracking the bugs and confirming that they have gotten fixed. It’s always a must to write efficient test cases. Then you need to run and re-run the test cases to ensure that your code is bug-free. Making changes to the code shouldn’t lead to any defects. To affirm this, you can use regression testing, another retesting form in website testing.
• Integrate Exploratory Testing with Software Development Life Cycle
  Exploratory testing reduces time and levels up the bug discovery process. Testers take some time to write and execute every test case on a simultaneous basis. When you fail to understand the setbacks of exploratory testing, you are prone to more bugs and defects. You can get done with the limitations imposed by website testing by integrating white-hat and black-hat software testing techniques. The integration can produce the most needed test results for your team and go on to reduce the time you take to test.
• Accessibility Testing is important
  Your website should be accessible to a wide range of users across the globe. A person with impairments should be able to access a particular website more easily. Hence it’s a must to perform accessibility testing to ensure that, for example, your text is also available in audio format through a screen reader and your image contains ALT text.
• Perform Database Testing
  Performing database testing is a must to check for query execution, query response time, reflection of test data, and avoiding data integrity. For example, when you want to perform Oracle testing, things get easier since you can connect Oracle cloud to different databases via networks. A database management system such as Oracle can help you manage your data and ensure fewer errors in your website database. You can also perform browser compatibility tests of SQL databases.
• Conduct Beta Testing
  We perform beta testing with the help of limited, real-time users. It’s a must to understand what your user thinks about your product.

Do you want to delve deeper into beta testing, an inseparable part of website testing? Learn how to perform beta testing for apps.

How to test a website?

You can perform website testing in two major ways: manual and automated. It’s tiresome to manually check your website, given the number of factors you need to consider to test it. When you consider physical device vs real device cloud testing, the winner is real device testing in most cases.

How to perform real-time testing and real device testing? That’s where TestMu AI comes to your aid!

This is how you can test your website:

• Cross-browser compatibility
• Responsiveness testing
• Functionality testing
• Broken link testing
• Security testing
• Payment gateway testing
• Cookie testing

To test your website, you can also use digital experience platforms such as TestMu AI to perform real-time testing and real device testing.

TestMu AI is a cross browser testing platform that allows you to test your website on 3000+ browsers, devices, hardware configuration, and OS. With TestMu AI, you can perform automated browser testing on a more secure, scalable, and reliable automation cloud platform.

What’s more? You can easily perform real time testing, real device cloud testing, automation testing, screenshot testing, visual UI testing, and responsiveness testing with TestMu AI.

Real Time Testing using TestMu AI

Test your sites for compatibility across different browsers and operating systems to ensure your customers have the best experience possible using the real time online browser testing feature provided by TestMu AI.

Here are the top three steps to perform real time testing:

Step 1: Sign up for free on TestMu AI and login to your account.

Step 2: Click the Realtime Testing card on the modal box.

It will guide you to the Real Time Browser Testing console.

Step 3: Select the configurations on which you want to test like VERSION, OS, RESOLUTION. Now, click START.

It will fire up a cloud-based real operating system to perform website testing.

Real Device Testing using TestMu AI

TestMu AI provides a wide range of real devices to support your development processes. You can test your applications on our real devices and get a great end-user experience.

Here are the four easy steps for real device testing:

Step 1: Login to TestMu AI by entering your credentials.

Step 2: Select Real Device from the left panel. Choose Real Time for conducting real time website testing.

Step 3: Select Browser Testing. You can provide the URL later when you start the session. Click START after providing the BROWSER, DEVICE TYPE, and DEVICE/OS.

Step 4: The website you want to test would open on your cloud-based real device launched by TestMu AI. Time to test!

Automation Testing using TestMu AI

With the TestMu AI cloud grid, you can get instant on-demand access to 3000+ desktop and mobile environments to run Selenium, Cypress, Puppeteer, Playwright, and Appium automation tests on reliable, scalable, and secure cloud-based infrastructure.

Here are the steps to perform automation testing on the TestMu AI platform.

Step 1: Sign up or Log in to your TestMu AI account.

Step 2: You can click the Automation tab in the left navigation, which allows the following options: Builds, Test Archive, Analytics.

Step 3: You can select the language of your choice and must configure the environment as per it. For example, for Java, you can configure the required details as given below.

Screenshot Testing using TestMu AI

TestMu AI allows you to take screenshots of your website or web applications in a single click.

Here are the steps to perform screenshot testing on the TestMu AI platform.

Step 1: Visit the TestMu AI platform.

Step 2: From More Tools, choose Screenshot in the left panel.

Step 3: Provide the URL to test. Choose the browser version for comparing different screenshots.

Step 4: It’s time for you to download and compare the screenshots.

Visual UI Testing using TestMu AI

Sometimes, we might miss out on a petty visual bug when we test in haste. With UI comparison, you can check how your web page looks and automatically get the data on errors without any manual processes. It’s as simple as this:

Here are the steps to perform Smart Visual UI testing on TestMu AI (assuming you are already on the Dashboard):

Step 1: Go to More Tools -> UI Comparison

Step 2: Provide the images you want to compare with the baseline image.

Step 3: Take a look at the difference. Compare it with the expected results.

Responsive Testing using TestMu AI

With responsive testing, you can see the website’s mobile view on various Android and iOS resolutions. You can also perform website testing on different pre-installed mobile device viewports.

You can follow the below steps to perform responsive testing on TestMu AI (assuming you are already on the Dashboard):

Step 1: Go to More Tools -> Responsive

Step 2: Provide the URL of your choice. Choose the device name and resolution of your choice to test. Click Generate. You can also use the Mark as Bug feature to mark the defects and bugs and report them.

Responsive Testing using LT Browser

LT Browser is our mobile-friendly test tool for checking the website’s responsiveness.

Test your website on major devices with the needed viewports. Type the URL and open the website in the LT Browser platform to test responsiveness across 50+ pre-installed device viewports.

This is how you can work on LT Browser from TestMu AI (assuming you are already on the Dashboard):

Step 1: Visit More Tools-> LT Browser. Download LT Browser For Windows. Click on Download Now.

Step 2: You can install LT Browser.

Step 3: Install LT Browser. To perform website testing, provide the URL on your tab. Next, select the device for testing your website.

Step 4: All done! You can also test two devices simultaneously. Click on the three-dotted lines at the top right corner. Select the New tab.

Step 5: Choose the desired device configuration or add your custom device by entering the user agent details.

Step 6: You can also test two devices simultaneously.

Step 7: Click on the camera icon to take screenshots. Compare the test results with the expected results.

Step 8: You can rotate the device by clicking on the Rotate icon to check how your website would respond.

Step 9: Click on the Debug icon to debug your website. You get access to Chrome Dev Tools.

Step 10: To check how your website responds to different network speeds, choose Network Throttling. Choose the network speed you need.

Step 11: Do you want to record how your website performs at different speeds? You can use the Video Recording option.

All these processes will hasten up your test cycle. At TestMu AI, you can leverage website testing on Vivo devices.