How many websites could be visited on a cell phone, let’s say, 15 years ago? A few. And those definitely were neither beautiful nor easy to use. But now users demand only well-designed, informative and responsive sites that work as fast as lightning. Even if your company site wasn’t that great from the start, there is a way to improve it.
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What tests can help you with optimizing your site?
Roughly speaking, all websites can be divided into two major groups. The first are the good sites that attract many visitors, bring many clients, high profits and big success. The second group unites all the bad sites, less visible, less attractive ones, that are pretty much useless to its owners. This raises the interesting question: what do the good sites have that the bad ones don’t?
Despite the fact that each website’s imperfection is unique, there are some similar patterns. The low-quality content, broken links, usability issues — those are the reasons that drive visitors away from your site right away. The additional risk is that people won’t even know that your website exists because the search engine won’t give them a chance to do it. What to do with all of this? The answer is simple — you should optimize and test your site.
In this case, the term “optimization” refers to the improvement of various areas of the site with the idea of increasing its efficiency and accessibility. This process, among other things, is aimed at making your website more user-friendly and better ranked by search engines. While there are many aspects of website optimization, let’s focus on the most complex ones.
- Functionality
The success of any website depends on its elements and whether they function correctly. Are there any errors in the source code of your website? Do all links work? Does every form work as it should? There are numerous technical aspects that you can check with the help of functional testing and make changes if needed. Besides links tests, forms tests, and HTML/CSS check, functional testing also includes cookies tests. Certainly, it is always better to detect bugs, flaws, and errors on your site before it goes live. But better late than never, right?
- Usability
No user wants to learn how to use the website. Your site must be designed in a way so that visitors can use it intuitively. Investing in UX optimization is what can truly help you win many visitors and get a competitive advantage over other brands. And here’s when usability testing comes into play. Usability tests help to check every feature, every element of the site that your users interact with (navigation bars, menus, buttons, forms, links, texts, images, videos, etc.), find the bottlenecks, and enhance the user experience significantly.
- User Interface
Another important area of optimization is the user interface. It starts with the UI testing that is intended to ensure that GUI contains the required functionalities and that all the specifications are met. In particular, UI testing includes checking the graphic design elements of the site, such as colors, fonts, labels, layout, text formatting, text fields, lists, labels, symbols, links, associated content, etc.
- Compatibility
The websites are usually only optimized for a few operating systems, apps, devices, and network environments. This can lead to many display errors which, obviously, makes the user experience much less enjoyable. This is exactly the reason why compatibility testing is so important. You should remember though that testing and optimizing a website for different browsers/systems/devices is a complicated task, therefore, it should be performed by real professionals.
- Performance
Every second counts. If your site doesn’t load fast enough, your visitors will leave it after a few moments and simply switch to the better option. The loading time of a site is particularly important for a decent user experience and ranking criteria for the Google search therefore often included in the optimization plan. Except for load speed tests, other types of website testing, such as stability, stress, volume, and concurrency tests can be performed to ensure the best performance possible.
Final thoughts
Only a small number of companies check their websites to identify areas for improvements. The practice shows that the ones that don’t, make a huge mistake. What stops the website owners from making their sites better is often the seeming complexity of the testing/optimization process. It happens because they don’t know that with the right testing provider they can find the room to improve their website and achieve their conversion goals much easier.
