Usability Testing
It is a vital testing for any website. This testing can be done by normal users or targeted audiences of the website. It is required to confirm that the website is user friendly, provided instructions are clear to understand, navigations are properly designed, no grammatical or spelling errors are contained in the site content and used fonts, colors, buttons etc. are appropriate according to the website.
Functionality Testing
Any website will function properly when all the requests sent to the server are processed correctly and the users will get the desired result as response. This testing will ensure that all links, forms and databases of the website are working properly.
It is necessary to confirm that various types of website links such as outgoing links, internal links, anchor links and mailto links are working without any error and no broken links exist in the website.
Form testing is another important part of website testing. Data are collected from the users by using forms. So it is very important to make sure that the validation tasks of every forms are completed properly. Each form must be designed with proper instructions and when any user fails to fill in the form with valid data then the user will get hints from the messages provided by the form.
One of major components of any website is a database. All data are manipulated between the website and database by using different types of queries. During the database testing it is required to ensure that all queries are executing without bugs, ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, isolation and Durability) properties of the database is maintained accurately and response time of the queries are fast.
Compatibility Testing
This testing is now taken as a important consideration. Now, people are using different types of browsers, operating systems and devices for browsing websites, such as mobile, tablet etc. It is essential to confirm that the developed website is compatible with mostly used web browsers, operating systems and smart devices. Before making any website live it should be tested with all popular web browsers and operating systems to find out any issue. The number of mobile users are increasing day by day. For this, most of the websites are now responsive and designed to be compatible with any type of device. So it is necessary to test the website on various smart devices without computer to check its compatibility.
Performance Testing
Every website has to take certain amount of load, based on the website type, which is related to performance issues. Two types of performance testing can be done for websites. These are load testing and stress testing. It requires to test how the website will act when many users will try to access same page or connect with the database at the same time. This is called load testing. In stress testing, it is checked that how the website will react when more stress is given to the site and if the site crashes then how it recovers. These testing are done by using different Internet connections.
Security Testing
This type of testing is more important for e-commerce based websites where confidential data are submitted by the users. Some necessary tasks related to this testing are secure transmission, Integrity checking, authentication and authorization checking, vulnerability checking, virus detection etc.
Website testing tools
Many types of website testing tools are now available for testing any website or web application. These tools will help to reduce the testing efforts, maintain the quality of the application and make the release time faster. Some category wised testing tools are described here.
Web Application testing tools
Both free and paid version tools are available for web application performance testing. Two web application testing tools are jMeter and Neoload.
JMeter:
It is a free tool which is developed in Java and supported by all platforms. It is used for load testing. It helps to analyze the overall performance of web applications by assigning various loads on the server.
Neoload:
This tool is used for both load and stress testing. It helps to measure, analyze and improve the performance of web applications.
Web functional or regression testing tools
Most of the errors of any websites are related to the website functionalities. By using appropriate functional tools, the bugs of the website can be removed quickly. Two popular functional testing tools are selenium and Testcafe.
Selenium:
It is a automated testing tools that tests website functionality on various browsers and platforms.
Testcafe:
It is a testing framework that can test multiple browsers and operating system simultaneously.
Website security testing tools
These tools are mainly used on those sites where money transactions are done online, such as banking site or e-commerce site. Two good tools for security testing are mentioned below.
NTOSpider:
This tool can be used only on windows operating system and it can ensure security of the system by testing the application within short time.
Netsparker:
It detects the application vulnerabilities and the issues related to website security.
Cross Browser testing tools
Many tools can be used for checking cross browser testing of the website. One of them is mentioned here.
Browsera:
This tool can be used on windows and Mac OS that detects cross-browser issues by comparing each browser’s output. JavaScript is used in this tool to report any error generated by this tool.
So, web site testing becomes much easier and faster now with the help of these testing tools.
Follow this website testing checklist and you will ensure you have a safe, fast and properly functioning website.
