A website is often a business’s first impression. It is the digital equivalent of a handshake and eye contact, and it immediately gives customers a feeling about a brand. That's why, whether you're selling shoes, a service, or a skill, creating a functional, user-friendly, and well-designed website is imperative.
An expertly designed website helps build trust between businesses and their target audiences, enhances brand reputation, and opens up conversations that keep potential customers engaged.
Knowing how to QA a website is key to ensuring that it is fully functional and will effectively capture the attention of your client’s target audiences.
Quality Assurance (QA) in web design testing is an essential process that enables a web development team to identify and correct glitches, usability issues, and bugs in your website designs before they go live. This helps ensure that every site is perfectly in line with a client’s exacting standards.
This guide will delve into the importance of knowing how to QA test a website in web design, explore the different testing phases, and share all the instructions and tools you need to secure technical expertise and create an exceptional user experience.
The Importance of Knowing How to QA a Website
Crafting a website requires a dedicated web design agency, plenty of skill, and equal amounts of dedication. However, even if a team has poured all of their knowledge into creating a site for a client during the development process, visitors are almost sure to click away if they encounter slow loading times, broken links, and substandard navigation systems.
This happens more often than you might think, particularly on websites that have not undergone extensive quality assurance testing before going live. Knowing how to QA a website is absolutely critical for ensuring that your website design does its job effectively and engages audiences long enough to convert them into customers.
Learning how to QA test a website has many other benefits, too. QA testing helps ensure excellent functionality by identifying errors and bugs that could prevent users from taking favourable actions, like making purchases or completing contact forms. A well-tested website that is fully functional helps build trust with visitors and keep them engaged from start to finish.
Testing your site during the web development process is also vital for identifying performance bottlenecks that slow your website’s loading speeds. Fast-loading websites are far more effective at keeping users engaged and improving SEO and search engine rankings.
Usability is another key factor to consider. QA testing pinpoints areas where your business site’s user experience could be clunky, frustrating, or confusing. You can then use this information to refine and enhance your website design layout, navigation and content, helping each user easily find exactly what they’re looking for.
Knowing how to QA a website also strengthens its security, making it more resilient against hackers and cybercriminals. Last but certainly not least, QA website testing ensures that a website delivers a memorable and seamless user experience for all visitors. This can translate into improved brand loyalty, higher conversion rates, and more customer satisfaction overall.
QA Quality Assurance Testing Phases Explained
Now that you understand the importance of website QA testing for functional website creation, it’s time to explore the different testing phases of web design QA tests.
This web development process is divided into several distinct test phases, each focusing on a different aspect of your site’s user experience and functionality.
Functionality Testing
All great website designs offer seamless functionality and an optimal viewing experience. Functionality testing helps ensure that all of a site's functions and features work as you intended them to, delivering a smooth and satisfactory user experience and enhancing search engine optimisation efforts.
As a web designer, you can perform functionality tests by first defining your test cases. Create a list of test cases that cover all of the most essential functions of your website, including logins, forms, shopping carts, search functions, test payment gateways, and other interactive elements that you have included.
Next, manually test your website design by navigating through it, simulating your users' actions, and extensively testing each function. Make notes of any unexpected outcomes, error messages, broken links, and inconsistencies that you encounter. These should be refined and eliminated.
You can also consider using automation tools and third-party software to streamline the manual testing phase. Tools like Selenium can automate your test cases, helping you optimise your site’s functionality as rapidly as possible. Testing management tools like Jira, Asana, and TestRail can also assist your team in organising test cases and collaborating across your web design agency to get your site running smoothly as quickly as possible.
Usability Testing
Usability website QA testing helps you deeply understand how users interact with your site while identifying elements that could be frustrating or confusing. This phase begins with tester recruitment; find a group of 5-10 testers (or more, depending on your project scope) based on your target audience.
You also need to define your testing tasks when building websites, which should reflect the real-world goals of your users and your ultimate project goals. These can include finding specific snippets of data, signing up for a service, contacting a support team, or completing a purchase.
You should also supervise your testing sessions, either remotely or in person, to observe the actions of your testing group, clarify any questions they may have, and take notes on usability issues they encounter. Once the digital services test is complete, assess the data you have obtained and share it with your web development team.
Identify key patterns in your site visitors' behaviour, pinpoint areas of confusion or poor usability, and strategise improvements that help to resolve all of the issues you have found and improve search engine optimisation results.
User testing platforms can help to simplify and streamline this phase for your QA team considerably. Platforms like UserTesting.com outsource your user testing, identifying pools of testers aligned with your target audience and hosting remote usability testing sessions.
If you are hosting the website development tests yourself, use tools like Hotjar to remotely record user testing sessions and refer back to screen recordings at a later time. You could even consider using eye-tracking software to identify where users’ attention is focused on your site, helping your web design agency optimise the site’s content placement and layout.
Performance Testing
A great website design should load rapidly and reliably across a range of browsers and devices. Performance testing can assist you in optimising your site’s responsiveness, loading speeds, and resource usage.
Web designers and their teams can start this testing phase by defining their site’s key performance benchmarks, including target loading times and preferred response rates. Next, use web development tools like WebPageTest or Google PageSpeed Insights to analyse your website's performance and pinpoint areas that need improvement.
From there, you can optimise website elements, such as caching mechanisms, code, or images, to ensure that they load quickly and smoothly every time.
Security Testing
Today’s website users are conscious of online security and demand a highly secure and private online experience. Website development security testing can unveil vulnerabilities in your site that cybercriminals could exploit. Correcting these vulnerabilities offers a high degree of protection for your users and their user data.
Begin by researching common site vulnerabilities like XSS attacks and SQL injection and creating a list of potential security risks. Then, use security testing tools like Acunetix, OpenVAS, or Netsparker to scan your site and identify weaknesses in its configuration and code. From there, you can patch vulnerabilities and use web security best practices to protect your website and your users' information.
Compatibility Testing
Websites need to look and function at their best across all browsers and devices. The web development compatibility testing phase helps ensure that your site displays and functions optimally across a diverse range of browsers, operating systems and devices, including mobile devices of various screen sizes.
This website development phase begins with a web design agency and web designers defining its compatibility requirements. This results in a list of operating systems, devices, and browsers that your site needs to support based on the needs and preferences of your target audience.
Next, use browser emulators and cloud-based testing platforms like BrowserStack to test your site on a range of different platforms. Make notes of any inconsistencies in layouts, functionality issues, or rendering errors that pop up on different platforms, and correct them to ensure that your site is seamlessly compatible with as many browsers and operating systems as possible.
The Role of Feedback in the QA Process
Knowing how to QA a website is critical for every web designer and web design agency, but it’s important to understand that QA testing is a collaborative endeavour. Clear, detailed, and actionable feedback from each testing phase and your web design team allows you to refine your site effectively and ensure that users enjoy a quality experience when it goes live.
Feedback helps you identify key issues, including bugs, usability, and performance bottlenecks in your web design project. Clear feedback from your testing groups enables developers to analyse the root causes of these issues and develop effective fixes for them. It also enables developers to prioritise improvements based on their impacts on user experience and to start with the most important fixes first.
Web designers, developers and QA testers should work closely together throughout the testing phases of their web design projects, exchanging actionable feedback to enhance every aspect of a site’s design, from functionality and layout to user experience.
When documented, this feedback creates valuable records of past issues and implemented solutions, which can be referred to at any time (and also during regression testing) to ensure that issues in design projects are permanently addressed.
Your web design agency and web design team need to establish a robust feedback loop throughout the entire QA testing process to ensure that all departments and professionals work towards the goal of launching a secure and functional website that impresses key clients and users alike.
Make QA Testing Work For Your Websites
Knowing how to QA a website is an invaluable skill that enhances user interactions and experience, improves brand reputation, and ultimately leads to more sales and conversions.
When building websites, follow the QA testing steps outlined in our guide and use the power of collaboration and feedback to ensure that each site delivers a perfect user experience across all devices and platforms!
If you're looking for a full-service web design agency, Ryde can help! Get in touch for a quote or check out examples of our work to see what we can do for you.