Web application testing: Your 10 step guide to website testing
Online platforms have become pretty much essential in business today. Almost every business runs online to some degree, and many important decisions are made using information gathered online.
As a result, the development of web applications is on the rise. But just having a website is not enough; you need to ensure it is error-free in order to deliver the service and reputation you need.
A bug in an app will not only ruin its position but ruin the user experience. So the need for making the best version of an application is essential. To ensure that your web application is user-friendly, easily accessible, and good enough to avoid any negative user impact it should be properly tested and any issues must be fixed.
For that web testing comes into play. By undertaking the web testing process, bugs and issues can be efficiently evaluated and fixed quickly. Before proceeding further a detailed understanding of web testing is a must. Let’s have a look at what web testing or website testing means.
What is web testing?
In simple terms testing a website thoroughly from every perspective of the user’s need is called the web testing process.
Web testing, or website testing, is a testing process of reviewing the web application or website for potential issues before it is accessible to web users. With the rapid growth in technologies, it has become crucial to provide the user application with a maximum number of features and with minimum or no bugs.
In web testing, the checking of web application or website functionality, usability, security, compatibility, and performance is done. Website accessibility to the general public and handling traffic is also checked. Web testing helps in finding any hidden bugs and fixing them effectively before the release of the application.
What information can web testing give you?
Web-based testing helps you discover information about different aspects of a website or application, including:
- Website security.
- Its performance, and usability risks.
- Accessibility to all the users and meeting their needs.
- Adaptability to various platforms.
- Ability to handle the traffic load.
Web app testing is important because:
- It reduces bugs and errors on the website.
- It increases the website’s usability.
- It ensures that the users visit the website often.
- It improves the search engine ranking, hence increasing awareness.
- It ensures compatibility with multiple platforms & browsers.
If you are thinking of leveraging all these benefits and generating optimal user experience then implementing a proper testing procedure with proper planning is a must.
Here are 10 steps you need to take to ensure the maximum outcomes of the web testing.
1) Establish your test goals and objectives
The first step in any proper testing procedure is prioritizing goals to make sure which major issues need to be checked first. If you don’t know the objectives before starting web testing you will have difficulty detecting bugs or faults. Testing is not about being perfect but it is the ability to meet the intended user’s requirements and expectations.
The best approach is to write your list of goals for testing this way you will ease out your task and will be focused on whether anything is missed out to check or not. Making a list and marking the objectives that require greater observation will also help your team members to understand and perform tests efficiently.
2) Create proper reports
Once the objective of testing is set the next step should be on creating reports. Reports are the status of the application process that includes a plan for bug tracking, defects, and other issues in the test cases, so they must be generated perfectly.
The purpose of creating reports is to manage testing tasks systematically and efficiently so that there will be no chance of confusion among the team members.
3) Check you have a proper test environment
Make arrangements for a test environment for carrying out environment testing. Because your existing computers might not appropriate in initiating a separate environment for testing. You need to have duplicate versions of the web application elements such as database servers, web servers, application servers, etc. if applicable.
Create a separate web application and database server as needed. You just need to move code to and from your test environment and make sure to test the source code to ensure that all issues are identified.
4) Keep a proper record of your results
While executing the web testing procedure, and during it you can find a number of defects, bugs, and issues that need to be addressed. Tracking the testing result and keeping the details of the findings in an organized manner is a must because this will your team members to identity and fix them later – ready to be retested.
5) Test your website’s functionality
You build a website for a purpose. So the next crucial step is to make sure that your website is performing appropriately for the tasks it was built for. This means ensuring that the web application is functioning optimally the way it was intended to.
Functionality testing also verifies the links within the web pages, database connections, forms to be fulfilled by the users, cookies, etc. and other important aspects of a web application are up to the mark.
6) Test your website’s compatibility
You will have a number of users using different devices, and they prefer to use the application on different browsers and operating systems. Some websites render elements differently in different browsers so the compatibility of your website must be tested to ensure that the display is consistent across a wide range of browsers and devices.
Compatibility testing includes verifying the application in different devices, browsers, and operating systems. It ensures that the web application is functioning smoothly irrespective of devices, browsers, and operating systems.
There are a number of tools where you can automate compatibility testing of your website and LambdaTest is one such platform to help you to have a consistent user experience irrespective of browsers and devices.
LambdaTest is a cloud-based cross-browser compatibility testing platform where you can perform both manual and automated cross-browser compatibility testing. This platform provides you with more than 3000 real devices, desktops, browsers, and operating systems along with their respective versions.
It makes sure that your web application is functioning smoothly and rendering the same on almost all the latest and the oldest devices and browsers. Using platforms like LambdaTest, you can also test your websites and web applications on virtual macOS online across different browsers.
7) Test your website’s usability
The purpose of building an application is to ensure maximum user experience. So usability testing is another important step to test how pleasing your application is to the users. If your web application is unable to impress users then they will quickly stop using it.
This testing is carried out to examine the navigation of your website. Usability testing also verifies that the application is understandable and easy to use as well as the displayed content on the website is also checked. This helps the testers to correct the weak spot and to detect bugs early.
8) Interface testing
Interface testing is another step in web application testing. It ensures proper communication between the server of the application, the web server, and the database. That means it makes sure that requests sent to your database server from your web application are correct and without any delay, and also that it is displaying correctly on UI.
This helps in finding out any interruptions or issues during data transfer and provides the user with smoothly functioning applications.
Interface testing helps in cases when database connections are not properly established due to internet error, or any client-side issues then it displays proper error messages to the users. LambdaTest can be used to automate Interface testing by ensuring that all the components are in sync.
9) Performance testing
In order to prevent situations, where a web application takes a long time to load or is unable to handle traffic load and the user stops using it as they may get many other options online. That is why peak performance is the key to the success of web applications today.
To achieve this, it is important to perform performance testing. This helps in identifying and verifying the maximum load the web application can manage and ensures its optimal performance under all the stress conditions.
It also helps in calculating breakpoint by applying stress to the application and checking how it responds. This will help you decide whether to upgrade the application or if the current version is okay. This testing helps in preparing for situations like whenever a high load crash occurs the application should recover itself automatically in less time.
10) Security testing
For any application as well as for any user, security is one of the most important features. An application stores users’ important data and sensitive information, so security should be a huge concern while building an application. It must be tested under security to provide the user hack proof and secure application thereby gaining user’s assurance.
Security testing helps in protecting a user’s data and verifies that it is not compromised by testing the security of all the pages and finding weak security points by preventing unapproved access to the web application. This testing also ensures that restricted files are not downloaded, the session timeout should automatically expire after an extended period of user inactivity.
Make sure you test your application thoroughly
Building the best version of your web application means you need to test all its major aspects. And following the 10 steps above will enable you to make your web application completely bug-free and provide your users with greater experience and help in increased revenues for your business.
