Website test: Important things to check before launching a new website

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It’s hard to be sure that your website works properly and gets ready to go live if you don’t take your time to test it out before the launch. Of course, your website needs fully checked before it’s launched. That’s true. Check out today’s article “Website test: Important things to check before launching a new website?” to know more.

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Owning websites seems so common and necessary these days. As the internet has been playing a more and more important role in our daily lives, it’s like a big mistake if businesses don’t have their own websites. And it’s even a much bigger mistake if a business website functions improperly after it goes live.

It’s vital to be sure that your website works properly before it goes live

We all know that a website is the online presence of a business, brand, or company. Think of when you see minor errors like typos, broken links, grammar mistakes, … on a business website, then you must think that they are so unprofessional, right? So, it’s crucial to carefully test a website to eliminate errors and bugs before launching a new website. Keep reading on to know important things to check when you conduct pre-launching website tests.

1- Page content and errors

First of all, don’t be in a hurry, let’s take time and check your page content to avoid typo errors. Try to proofread the entire content on your site. If you see any typing errors or grammatical mistakes on the homepage, contact page, or somewhere else, ask your designers to fix them.

Your web content should have a correct font size and font style that’s easy to read. Check if all paragraphs, lists, headings are formatted correctly and if there’s any generic content (or lorem ipsum) still on the site or not, …

You should also look out for media content on your site such as images, videos, and audio files to see if they work properly and are consistent with text content or not.

Don’t be in a hurry, let’s take time and check your page content to avoid typo errors

2- Website test: Check browser compatibility and mobile responsiveness

Users can visit your site from any web browser, operating systems, and devices. That’s the reason why it’s necessary to check the compatibility of your site with as many browsers as possible rather than just the targeted ones. In case you can’t test compatibility on every browser, then you should check it on popular ones such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, …

Along with testing the site’s browser compatibility, it’s also important to test its mobile responsiveness. Do you know that more than 70 percent of visitors these days prefer to access the internet and websites over mobile devices? So, your site should be as pleasing and well functional on mobile as it’s on the desktop version.

As for checking mobile responsiveness, you need to verify if the texts are easy to read or not, navigation is comfortable, content is displayed in the same format as on desktops, … when it comes to the mobile version.

It’s hard to be sure that your website is ready to go live without website tests

3- Check usability of your site

Site usability is a very important element of a web app, especially when it comes to conversion rates and SEO optimization. That’s why you need to make sure all the things related to the functional aspects of your site are working as expected.

As checking the usability of your site, you need to consider the following things:

Test the overall user experience of your site from the point of view of a visitor.
Check your site’s login procedure, credentials, and roles if it is a multi-user site.
Check the site’s call-to-action and its contact forms.
Check if images are all optimized for speed
…

Also, if it’s an e-commerce site that has payment options, then you need to carefully verify the payment options, including the success page redirect.

Website test: Site usability is a very important element of a web app

4- Check all URLs

The next thing you should do when performing website tests before the launch is to check all URLs and make sure that they are all live and function properly.

Often, it’s necessary for a website to change all of its URLs when it’s moved from the staging area to production. So, you need to double-check to make sure that all the URLs of your site are correct on the live version.

Maintaining a good loading speed of your site should be one of your top priorities

5- Website test: Review the site’s loading speed

The loading speed of a website significantly affects not only the user experience but also the web ranking on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Visitors will abandon a site if it takes too long to load. Well, if there’s a very small delay of 0.1 seconds in page loading time, a site can lose up to 40 percent of traffic. What a huge number!

For that reason, maintaining a good loading speed of your site should be one of your top priorities. The faster your site, the higher ranks on Google and other search engines, the more traffic, and the more satisfied your visitors as well.

To check your site’s loading speed, you can use the tool of Google’s PageSpeed Insights and check how fast every single page loads. If you find it necessary to speed up your page loading speed, you might need to consider the following things:

Using tools like Gzip.
Choosing a faster hosting provider.
Using a content delivery network (CDN) to reduce the loading time on the server.
Try minifying the JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.
…

You need to ensure that every content on your site is well optimized and SEO friendly

6- Check your SEO

No one of us wants our sites to be on the very last pages on SERPs, so, the next thing to do is to deal with on-page SEO. That means you need to ensure that every content on your site is well optimized and SEO friendly. Check if there is any page on your site lacking a unique title tag and unique meta description with proper keywords or not.

You should also need to care about the titles, URLs, headings and body content, images, and all texts. Make sure that your keywords are placed appropriately in the page content. When it comes to SEO, you might need to have tools like Google Analytics (GA) and Google Search Console (GSC). While GA helps analyze traffic and visitors on the site, GSC will let you know which keywords your website is ranking for and track your site’s performance in SERPs.

Website test: It’s crucial to make sure your site is secured and having an SSL

7- Check the site’s security with SSL Certificate

It’s crucial to make sure your site is secured and having an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate should be your top priority. An SSL certificate will protect your website and keep the data transferred between your website and the end-users secured and private. Besides, using SSL also helps boost SEO performance as it’s become a part of the search ranking algorithm of Google search engine.

8- Check your backup solution

A suitable backup is considered a must for a website to be ready to go live. Of course, no one of us wants to lose the site’s data after launching it. That’s the reason why it’s so important to have a backup solution installed in case something goes wrong with the website.

Backing up the website data helps you save a lot of time, money, and nerves. So, before the site goes live, you need to review the backup solution properly to make sure its working process is all okay and the site is ready to be launched.

A suitable backup is considered a must for a website being ready to go live

9- Verify the navigation process

The next thing you should do when performing website tests before launching a website is to check the navigation process. No web app works without navigation, and it’s so bad if a visitor is unsure of which button to click on while he or she browses around your site.

Check out every navigation step from the homepage to the check out page while moving through different areas of your website. Besides, the on-site search also needs to work accurately and smoothly, so check and verify the navigation process as an end-user.

It’s so bad if a visitor is unsure of which button to click on while he or she browses around your site

10- Check HTML/CSS errors

Though minor HTML/CSS errors don’t affect the SEO of the website, it can impact your site’s performance and speed. That’s why it’s recommended to double-check every code and make sure the code is clean and proper. In that way, your visitors will have a good experience when accessing your site.

It might be a very big mistake if you skip doing website tests before launching a new website

Check your sitemap

When a website is turned to the public, search engines such as Google, for example, are not automatically aware of this. So, if you want to get them to index your website correctly and recognize new pages that you’ve published already, then you’ll need to have an XML sitemap.

It’s a specific file that lists all of your site’s pages. This file will help the search engines to understand the structure of your website and what pages are more important. There are various SEO plugins out there, like Yoast SEO for WordPress for example, that will help create and maintain XML sitemap automatically.

So, before launching your new website, don’t forget to check and make sure that your site has a sitemap. If your site lacks a sitemap, take time and create it.

To get search engines to index your website correctly and recognize your new pages, then you’ll need to have an XML sitemap

Conclusion

Here are all the things that we want to share with you via today’s article “Website test: Important things to check before launching a new website?”. Of course, there are still other things and factors that you need to check before your website goes live. The 11 ones mentioned above are the basic and very important aspects for you to check, review, and make sure that they are all okay before the launch. Finally, we really hope this article did bring you helpful and interesting information.

Cre:

dzone.com/articles/the-ultimate-website-testing-checklist-before-goin

etondigital.com/things-check-new-website-launch/

circlesstudio.com/blog/critical-items-website-launch-checklist/