A 7-Step QA Checklist for Testing Websites

A website is crucial for any online business, with almost five billion daily internet users. The internet provides an ideal platform for businesses to reach a broad audience.

Nevertheless, a website’s success heavily relies on its user experience and performance, regardless of its offerings. The user experience includes ease of navigation, loading speed, and mobile responsiveness, while website performance involves optimizing for speed and reliability.

Businesses must prioritize these factors to ensure their website meets user expectations and achieves its objectives.

What is the importance of Website Quality Assurance Testing?

Due to shorter attention spans, a single site anomaly can result in a user bouncing or loss of revenue. Every online business should conduct thorough website quality assurance testing. 

In order to demonstrate why QA testing is so important, let’s take a look at some statistics:

• In the event of a bad user experience, one in three customers will stop interacting with a specific website.
• Without a good mobile website design, 57% of users won’t recommend a business.
• The majority of online customers said they are less likely to return to a website if they’ve had a negative experience.
• In order to deliver a reliable, bug-free, and intuitive user experience, quality assurance testing of a website is essential. 

Website QA Test Checklist

To help ensure businesses deliver the best website user experience, this guide describes a comprehensive QA checklist for website quality assurance testing. 

This QA checklist will help teams address the key focus areas from a testing standpoint. 

1. Ensure Cross Browser Compatibility

One of the most significant challenges for website testing is cross-browser compatibility. Every browser has its unique rendering engine, and the rendering engines may differ even between different versions of the same browser. This means that a website’s appearance may vary significantly across different browsers, which can lead to an inconsistent user experience. 

To prevent these inconsistencies, quality assurance (QA) testers must perform thorough cross-browser testing for their websites. This process involves testing the website on different browsers and versions to ensure that it looks and functions correctly on all of them. By doing so, teams can optimize the website’s viewing experience for all the leading browsers and address any rendering issues that may appear on specific browsers. 

2. Test for Responsiveness

A responsive layout allows websites to dynamically resize themselves for optimal viewing on different screen sizes, with nearly 60% of website traffic coming from mobile devices.

Mobile users are important and developers must ensure their websites are mobile-responsive to provide the best user experience.

A mobile-responsive design is crucial for SEO since Google has shifted to a mobile-first indexing algorithm. Responsive design can introduce issues such as misaligned buttons or links that are difficult to tap.

To avoid these issues, it’s recommended to use an online responsive design checker tool to view the website across different devices.

3. Functionality Testing

This is the most essential yet critical website QA testing phase where a QA must thoroughly test all the UI elements regarding maximum use case scenarios. 

Validating the UI elements contains testing:

• Forms for data input validity and login procedure
• Text fields
• CTAs
• Dropdowns
• Header navigation and search box
• Critical user flow
• Formatting and spacing

Testing all the above elements manually might be suitable for a smaller website. However, comprehensive UI testing for larger websites is a daunting job. Teams must prefer test automation tools like Selenium to conduct automated parallel tests. It helps validate UI functionality quickly.

4. Check for Broken Links

Broken links can lead to a frustrating user experience and negatively impact a website’s SEO. To ensure all links are directed to the intended landing pages or documents, QAs should use online speed optimization plugins to identify and fix broken links.

 Once identified, adding the appropriate link or a redirect is crucial. 

Additionally, it is important to verify that all key links, even if not broken, are directed to the intended pages by testing header navigation links and other important links.

5. Ensure Security

Security testing is crucial for online businesses, especially for e-commerce websites that collect personal information. 

Ensure the SSL certificate is in place to encrypt data and protect sensitive user information. This is a requirement for payment gateway integrations and checkout pages.

Redirect HTTP traffic to the HTTPS version of the site to ensure all connections are secure.

6. Test Payment Gateways

To ensure smooth online transactions, it is crucial for websites to thoroughly test the integrations with their payment solutions provider. 

This involves making dummy payments in a sandbox environment to test all payment modes and creating necessary test cases beforehand. 

By doing so, teams can prevent customers from encountering payment-related issues and ensure a seamless payment experience.

7. Cookie Testing

Cookies are small text files that contain user-specific information, such as login details, shopping cart items, visited pages, and IP addresses. These files are stored in the user’s browser and used for various purposes, including personalizing content and sending personalized ads.

To ensure that the website behaves correctly with cookies enabled or disabled, it is essential to test it across different user scenarios. This can be achieved by testing the website on multiple browsers in real user conditions, using a real device cloud. This approach helps QAs to verify that everything works as intended and the website functions correctly for users with or without cookies.

Also Read: How Can Website Testing Services Be Outsourced?

Key Takeaways for Website QA Testing

In today’s digital age, having a website is not enough. Delivering a seamless and bug-free user experience is essential to establish credibility and success online.

 Our QA checklist is designed to help businesses focus on critical areas of website testing and release robust web applications in the fast-paced digital world. Don’t just have a website – succeed online with TestUnity.

When it comes to QA, nothing is better than having the correct people in charge. That’s why we make sure that everyone on our team is qualified and accredited on some of the industry’s best practices. 

At TestUnity we have an expert team of QA Engineers. This enables us to give our clients the support they require to make sure that their software hits the market in the right circumstances. Contact us for a free consultation and see why TestUnity’s QA approach is the best choice for your software.

TestUnity

Testunity is a SaaS-based technology platform driven by a vast community of testers & QAs spread around the world, powered by technology & testing experts to create the dedicated testing hub. Which is capable of providing almost all kind of testing services for almost all the platforms exists in software word.