How To Test a Website: 9 Website Tests To Check Performance

When people visit your website, you want it to work as intended. If users have a bad experience on your site, they’ll likely move on—and they may not come back. That’s not a good way to turn your site visitors into customers.

You can ensure your ecommerce site is crossing all the right t’s and dotting all the right i’s through website testing. Let’s take a look at how you can test your site across a variety of domains, including its functionality and performance.

What is website testing?

Website testing is a process by which you analyze and assess how different site visitors can use your website’s various functions—everything from login fields and navigation to buttons, forms, and links. Any small glitch or friction on your site could end up alienating a potential customer, which is why testing is important.

You can conduct manual website testing, but larger sites benefit from performing regular tests with automated tools. You can integrate tools from the Shopify App Store yourself or task web developers to set up automated testing functionality for you.

9 types of website testing

1. Functionality testing
2. Usability testing
3. Compatibility testing
4. Performance testing
5. Accessibility testing
6. Security testing
7. Regression testing
8. Localization testing
9. Database testing

Employing these web tests regularly will help ensure your site is available and usable by as many people as possible:

1. Functionality testing

If several parts of the user interface are broken or glitchy, people won’t use your site. That’s where functional testing comes in to help. Website unit testing (testing the smallest, independent parts of your code in isolation) and website quality assurance testing (making sure everything works together before going live) are both ways to test for functionality.

Every month or whenever you get a customer service complaint, ensure that core functions like login fields, search bars, and navigation menus work as intended. Check that visual elements and videos load properly, your text is readable, and there aren’t any broken links.

If your site is relatively small and uncomplicated, you can test the functionality of everything manually. Alternatively, your development team can write scripts that test each element and validate the results, or you can use pre-existing tools like BrowserStack Automate, Selenium, or Cypress.

2. Usability testing

Usability testing minimizes any areas of friction between your site and your users, ensuring that navigation is intuitive. This phase of testing is all about making the user experience (UX) flawless.

Whenever you introduce a new interactive element to your website, take the following steps to perform usability testing:

• Plan the goals of your test. Are you specifically looking to see if visitors can find the contact info or complete a purchase? Limit each test to one task.

• Define and recruit your target audience. Who does your site cater to? Recruit target users that match those demographics and ask them if they’d be interested in completing a task on your site in exchange for a small fee, product discount, or store credit.

• Conduct the test. Hop on a video call and ask the participant to complete the test (such as filling out a form) without guiding them or dictating how they should complete the task. See where they run into roadblocks, confusion, or elements not working as they should.

• Take action. Collect feedback from your user tests to make improvements.

You can also use tools like BrowserStack App Live and Dynatrace for this.

3. Compatibility testing

Compatibility testing guarantees your site works across mobile devices, browsers, and operating systems. It enhances user satisfaction across dynamic websites on all platforms.

Whenever you implement big design changes to your website, follow these steps for the compatibility testing process:

• Design your test cases. If you changed your checkout flow, make sure that it works just as well on desktop as it does on your mobile website.

• Execute your test. Perform the test yourself or give a user instructions on how to complete the test across devices.

• Analyze the results. Which browsers or OS platforms work best? Where did the functionality not work as expected? Make changes to resolve the issues, then retest the fix.

Tools like Screenfly or Blazemeter can help you test for software and hardware compatibility and make sure your site works with older platforms and is ready for newer ones.

4. Performance testing

Performance testing measures how well your website performs across metrics like responsiveness, stability, speed, and reliability. It helps make sure your site works under different load conditions, volumes of data, and network environments. As part of performance testing, integration testing ensures that the different parts of your site or systems work together, including web applications and plug-ins.

Keep these steps in mind for performance testing:

• Choose your testing environment and tools. If you want to test for site speed, choose a test focusing on that.

• Specify acceptable performance levels. Is page load time under three seconds? How many pages can your site handle in a given time?

• Create your testing scenarios. Will you test site speed? How many crashes under high-traffic load?

• Run the performance tests. Use the testing tools you chose to measure your site against the acceptable performance levels.

• Analyze the results. When does your site tend to crash? How fast does it load across pages and operating systems? Does it work consistently and reliably? If not, make any fixes and retest if needed.

Tools like Uptrends and Datadog can help with this.

5. Accessibility testing

Accessibility testing sets up people with visual, auditory, mobile, and cognitive disabilities for success when it comes to exploring your website—and it’s required under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Here are the steps to perform website accessibility testing:

• Test across domains. You’ll want to assess accessibility for people with visual, hearing, mobility, and cognitive impairments

• Analyze the results. Are all users able to access your site and receive the information you want to share with them?

• Make improvements. Do you need to add alt tags or descriptive tags for visual assets? What about closed captions for video?

• Re-test. Once you’ve made changes, make sure they work with a post-fix test.

Tools like Siteimprove and Applause can help with accessibility web testing.

6. Security testing

Ensuring the safety and security of your users’ data, especially financial or health data, is paramount. These are the steps for the security testing process:

• Plan and define the scope of your testing. Focus on one area at a time, like whether authentication systems allow users access to the appropriate parts of your site.

• Scan and test for potential issues. Are the places people can input their data secure? Are they protected against things like malicious code input?

• Perform a code review. Make sure your code is updated and doesn’t contain any flaws that could lead to lower security.

• Continually monitor and test for security. Attacks and other insecure events happen regularly, so your site needs to stay vigilant.

Tools like OWASP and VulScan can help with this.

7. Regression testing

As you improve and change your website, you’ll typically add functionalities and fix bugs. Sometimes, these changes can introduce unintended conflict with existing systems or website functionality. Regression testing lets you identify these problems and trace them back to their source.

Generally, you’ll test for older, known bugs after you make changes to make sure the old issue doesn’t come back. You’ll want to do this after every change you make to your website functionality.

The steps for regression testing include:

• Identify changes you’ve made. Compare the most recent code to the previous (working) code.

• Choose and prepare the environment and tools. Make sure you know how to best use your chosen testing tools.

• Execute tests. You’ll want to ferret out bugs introduced by new code.

• Analyze results. Does your new code cause problems? Make changes as needed, then re-test.

Both Selenium and Cypress are tools that can help you perform this type of testing.

8. Localization testing

Website localization testing makes sure your website works well in all the regions and languages you want to serve. Well-designed localization helps when you want to scale your site, too, making it easier to add new languages and regional content. Steps include:

• Identify your target markets and languages. You only need to focus on the specific places and languages you want to have on your site.

• Create translations and adapt layout. Make sure each language and culture is represented on your site and easily accessible.

• Conduct comparison testing. Is everything translated well? Are fluent speakers able to access the content?

• Analyze and make improvements. Re-test if necessary.

Tools like Browserstack and Smartcat can help with localization testing.

9. Database testing

A high volume of website data allows you to make better decisions as you grow your business, but data is only useful if it’s accurate and consistent.

Follow these steps for your database server testing, as well as penetration testing (making sure your database is secure against malicious attacks):

• Define clear testing goals. Are you looking to increase the speed of data retrieval, the security of your data, or its consistency? Choose your goal and focus there.

• Prepare your test environment and tools. Make sure you have the right tools for the job.

• Test your database. Does your database perform as fast as you want? Are users able to input and retrieve what they need consistently and accurately?

• Analyze results. If needed, you can make changes and re-test.

Tools like HammerDB and SQL Developer can help test for data integrity.