How to Test Your New Website
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Launching a website is incredibly hard work, typically involving months of planning and difficult coordination with designers and even site engineers to help translate your vision in an effective manner. You might feel exhausted after finally finishing everything, but the work is not over yet – you need to test your website so it’s ready, usable and successful (bugs can be a sure-fire way to repel visitors). Make sure you test the following areas before launch and your worries about usability will melt away.
Forms
Launch the site preview and go through the forms that are at any point in your site. Pretend you’ve never seen them before (alternatively maybe try to get a family member to go through them) and ask the following questions: Do you get stuck at any point? Are the instructions clear and accurate? Does the form go to the right place after its submitted?
Images
Images that are too large can completely ruin your site’s speed, so check what size the images are. Besides carefully checking image sizes, you need to check that your images are properly labeled with titles and alternative text for SEO optimization.
Site speed
You should check the load time of each page, and use a speed test to check your speed ranking. Testing the speed of your and finding out what is slowing it down is essential. People who have to wait longer than 3 seconds will likely leave the page and take their custom elsewhere to a website that will load much faster so be sure to set this as a priority.
Mobile usability
It is imperative that your site can be easily viewed and used from a mobile device. This isn’t too hard anymore with site-builders offering conversion services, but if you’re doing it manually make sure your text is not too small, your mobile viewpoint is set and scrolling is easy.
If you really are drained from launch-prep and testing for this seems incredibly daunting, you can take the easy way out and use a testing company such as Digivante that will test all these plus more. It enables you to test your site is working well when it’s actually live. Live testing is highly recommended and practiced by more successful websites.
Navigation
Go through every single navigation route possible on your site and make sure every link works all the time. It can be too easy to forget that you didn’t add a hyperlink to a page that is not developed yet, and this can make your site seem very unprofessional. Looking at this through a customer’s point of view can be a real eye-opener to how easy the UX is. If you find that actually it is quite to difficult to navigate, then making changes needs to happen fast.
Get 404-ready
Assume that somebody will get lost on your site, even if your navigation is top notch and super intuitive. You should have a custom 404 page with a helpful sitemap and even a site search, to make it easy for users to find where they want to go and not spend any valuable time or energy not actually browsing your site.