JasmineDesign

Ever wondered if your Website is meeting its full potential?

Website and Page Testing

You may already have a website that you're happy with. After all it looks great just like you wanted, and it does everything that you asked your designer and developer to make it do. But is it performing as well as it potentially could?

Well there are some simple diagnostic tests that can be run which will answer that for you, and you don't need any special skills to be able to run these tests either.

Most people will hopefully think of testing their website when it's new, making sure the pages and their contents are all present, correct and functioning.

But testing your website should not be limited to a one time task just for newly deployed sites. As there are other reasons and ways to test your website, that ensure it is functioning to the best of it's abilities for both you and your customers.

For starters have you ever tried using your website as a customer / user, to see how it does or doesn't work for them? This could be a helpful way to workout if there are any usability or accessibility problems that need addressing, which could potentially be costing you customers.

We have a article on how to approach this, in the tips section of our Jasmine Web Starter tutorial Customer Shoes.

In Browser Testing

These days your website needs to perform well and be accessible, otherwise this will effect your search engine rankings, but how can you test for this? The answer is actually right here in your browser and it's free thanks to Googles Lighthouse Testing.

Lighthouse is an open-source tool that can be found in both Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge browser DevTools. It's designed to help improve the quality of webpages by auditing for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO, and more. It runs tests on one webpage at a time in each of these areas, and then gives you a score out of 100 for each of them. For those unable to access DevTools you can still run a Lighthouse audit by going to Google for Developers PageSpeed Insights page and adding the URL of the page you wish to audit.

You can find out more about using Lighthouse, plus some of the more common errors highlighted within an audit, in the tips section of our Jasmine Web Starter tutorial Lighthouse & Lighthouse fixes.

Lighthouse Results

Both of these ways to run an audit will give you the same reported results. Which Google have made as user friendly as possible with the use of a traffic light system when scoring the categories.

How scores are color-coded

The metrics scores and the performance score are coloured according to these ranges:

• 0 to 49 (red): Poor
• 50 to 89 (orange): Needs Improvement
• 90 to 100 (green): Good

According to Google - "To provide a good user experience, sites should strive to have a good score (90-100).

Lighthouse provides clear numbers and offers advise below to fix any issues that it has flagged up but sometimes advanced knowledge maybe required to fully understand and work with.

We are always happy to work with you get your website in the best shape, so if you do have any questions from your testing then please Contact Us.

More Advanced Testing

Testing other Platforms and Browser versions

The websites that we work on are all tested using modern desktop and mobile browsers. We test the current release and the last two versions if we can.

We make use of remote browser testing for the devices and version that we don't have direct access to from browserstack.com.

We believe that testing on the platforms and browsers that the website users are using is important, this is why web server logs and analytics should be part of your thinking whilst running a website.

Automatic Testing

Depending on how your website is being published you can chose to automate testing within the publishing loop, a good way to get started on this is GitHub Actions.

Playwright by Microsoft, was created specifically to accommodate the needs of end-to-end testing. Playwright supports all modern rendering engines including Chromium, WebKit, and Firefox. Test on Windows, Linux, and macOS, locally or on CI, headless or headed with native mobile emulation of Google Chrome for Android and Mobile Safari.

So if your website is making a large number of changes on a regularly basis then putting in place an automated testing solution can be a great addition.

We would be happy to help you setup and use an automate testing Contact Us to see how we can help you.