When you put those finishing touches on a website build, it’s tempting to just get it launched and admire your technical handiwork and attractive web design. But hold off. There’s one thing you have to do first — and, for that matter, afterward too.
It’s testing.
There’s nothing more imperative that thorough testing — because there’s nothing worse for your brand image than the user experience being confusing or outright broken.
How do you do it? Well, assuming your design and the applications are complete, here’s an overview of our approach at Flawless Inbound.
1: Inspect the Design
Before getting into testing functionality, we take a look at the visual elements. Build yourself a checklist of everything you need to confirm and ensure looks good and go through it. You might start with:
- Logo
- Fonts
- CTAs
- Images
- Layout
- Consistency
What might look good in isolation might not look so good once laid out on the page along with everything else.
2: Test the Functionalities and Integrations
Of course, your website should do what you intend for it to do. In this second step, we test our animations and web applications. We make sure that security is in place and that forms submit and perform correctly. We check all links and make sure they are all working and that they all have titles for SEO.
Basically, if the user can see it, if we want them to click it, we need to know the right thing will happen. Things can change during production, even things as simple and obvious as a URL change can break a critical link.
3: Cross-Browser Compatibility
At this stage, we make sure that the design scales for every device. With mobile views easily outpacing traditional desktop in many industries, responsive design is overwhelmingly a necessity.
We start with the Google Developer tools, move to mobile devices, and finally check on all major internet browsers. We also do a double check to make sure that animations and web applications work or are hidden on mobile devices. Sometimes something that looks awesome on a big screen just slows things down for a user casually scrolling on a phone.
4: Content Overview
Here, we make sure that the content is readable, useful and easy to scan. Again, when your content exists in Word documents before it goes to the website, things might just not read right when it’s in the final Header/Paragraph styles, when it’s sitting next to images and in buttons.
Take the time for a deep proofread and make any changes you need.
5: SEO Review
Lastly, we review that the website follows SEO current trends and that the site has a strong structure. SEO is constantly in flux as algorithms change, and any website will benefit from another once-over just to make sure everything’s in its correct place.
There’s no bigger disappointment than building a beautiful, functional site that never ranks.
6: Ready to Liftoff!
You’re done — sort of! We are ready to launch to the live domain. But once the site is launched and live, we go through each one of these steps one more time to make sure everything works and nothing got lost in the transition.
Thanks for reading our quick primer on how testing your website is imperative. Each one of these steps is vital assurance that you’ve done a good job and your website performs reliably. Don’t skip them just because you think you’ve got it!
Need a hand with a website build of your own? Flawless Inbound is a full-service growth partner capable of everything from building you a results-oriented website to all the campaigns and strategies that fuel that website’s success. We’ve put our playbooks to work for more than 80 B2B companies — and if you want to be the next, you can reach out to us right here.
Or you can learn more about our methodology via the link below!
