The internet has become an integral part of our lives. There are billions of active users who access the internet on a daily basis.
This has given rise to the increasing importance of web apps as they help in accessing information, making decisions, doing business around the world, and reaching new users.
The organization must check for a web app to get potential bugs before releasing it to ensure a flawless user experience with web testing.
For that, precise web testing is an essential step before moving the code to production.
Starting with what exactly web testing means, we will proceed to its types, why it is important to perform this testing, and many more.
So let’s start with what is web testing.
What Is The Meaning Of Web Testing?
Web testing is the practice of testing websites and web applications to identify unwanted bugs or underlying issues before they are available to users.
It focuses on application functionality, usability, accessibility, security, compatibility across devices, performance, and ability to handle the traffic load.
In Web testing, testers use a variety of methods to test web applications, including manual testing, automated testing, and load testing. It is to verify that web applications are functioning as intended and users get a pleasant experience while using them.
Web testing makes it possible to ensure that there are no broken links on your app and every feature is working properly before reaching its users. Moreover, nowadays, people view apps on a wide range of different devices and platforms.
The same is applicable to browsers also. Web testing enables the testers to check that an app runs on all devices, platforms, and browsers.
Why Is It Essential To Perform Website Testing?
With the growing number of mobile devices, billions of smartphone users can access the internet from anywhere, at any time.
To stay competitive in a complex marketplace, it is necessary to provide an informative, user-friendly, and accessible digital experience to every user. To attain this, website testing is needed. Let’s find out more reasons to perform this testing.
- Website testing is required in developing a feature and delivering bug-free applications.
- If testers do not perform web testing, there are high chances of reporting issues by the end users. Due to the risk of defects, the probability of losing customers is high.
- Compromised application quality may dissatisfy the users and negatively mark the organization’s reputation.
- A flawless and fully functioning application can only be achieved by performing web testing as it enables the detection and reporting of application defects.
- Providing high-quality, bug-free applications brings new users that eventually result in bringing profit to the organization.
- Anything is possible while establishing a website, like broken links, slow image loading, web security, difficult navigation, and other issues.
- Additionally, slow sites lack behind on Google ranking profiles. Thus, through a proper web testing strategy, these risks can be reduced, and website quality can be maintained.
Benefits Of Web App Testing
Web testing brings a lot of benefits. They are as follows-
- Web testing increases website usability by delivering high-quality websites.
- It provides a higher customer satisfaction index that enables visitors to come back frequently.
- Web testing assures that the application is fully functional. This improves its ranking on the google search engine.
- An efficient web testing strategy helps find and resolve bugs early. Hence testers can release more new features quickly.
- Website testing ensures with multiple platforms & browsers
- Carefully and precisely running tests on the web application leads to fewer chances of risk and failure later on. This leads to boosting application performance and protects the organization’s reputation.
- Web testing with an automated testing tool saves a lot of time and energy. This also ensures a positive return on investment.
- It draws more inbound links. Thus are also increasing brand awareness and increasing revenue.
Challenges Of Website Testing
Like every other testing, web testing is also not simple. To reap the benefits, it is important to address a number of issues. Some of them are addressed below.
Cross-device and cross-platform testing is an important phase of quality assurance. It gives the tester an understanding of how the app looks and performs on different device-browser combinations.
With an increasing number of combinations of devices (both modern and legacy) and platforms for users to choose from, they always prefer scalable and highly interactive web applications.
Overview:
- Inconsistencies
- Unsecured Communication
- Scalability
1. Inconsistencies
Inconsistencies while browsing across browsers can negatively impact the organization’s reputation and growth. But with limited access to a range of all possible devices, it becomes burdensome to capture some bugs during web application web testing.
Another important task for testers is to monitor the security testing process to avoid loss of information and data and encountering cyber threats that can leak users’ sensitive data.
2. Unsecured Communication
Challenges in dealing with security testing are unsecured communication and removing harmful files. If a security firewall breaks due to any reason, it becomes challenging to connect with them because it can block a web app due to security certificate compliance issues.
Conducting web testing and developing website applications is changing into an iterative process. Such practices are having a negative impact because defects are not getting fixed any faster, even after adopting the agile method.
This is because teams are all under immense pressure to conduct website testing. This is also going on a more regular basis. Consequently, exploratory testing often gets skipped as teams rush to push a website through a specific development process, creating bottleneck testing.
3. Scalability
Lack of addressing issues and unidentified factors such as scalability of the app’s features, compatibility, and integration limitations affect performance testing, which leads to performance issues.
Slow-loading web testing apps encourage the user’s to give up, which eventually affects the organization’s reputation and its revenue.
How To Execute Web Testing?
There are six main areas of web testing techniques that need to be looked at while testing a web app. Here we will discuss each in short.
Overview:
- Functionality Testing
- Performance Testing
- Compatibility Testing
- Security Testing
- Interface Testing
- Usability Testing
1. Functionality Testing
The main objective of functional web testing is to ensure that all of the features and functionalities of a web application function smoothly without any error.
It includes verification of the correct operation of all links, cookie testing, reviewing forms on all webpages, evaluating database security, validating CSS or HTML, appropriate error notification of invalid inputs, and many more.
2. Performance Testing
Performance web testing tests a web application’s performance under various scenarios. This includes stress testing (determine the breaking point of an application if put under increasing amounts of stress), load testing ( testing under different internet speeds), and scalability testing.
Typically, this testing method tests a website’s functionality across different scenarios, hardware configurations, platforms, operating systems, and more. So that the application can recover from crashes in the best way possible.
3. Compatibility Testing
It is a key step in web application testing. This testing ensures that your application is compatible with all browsers and devices, and operating systems. The different elements of compatibility web testing are
- Browser Compatibility- It is to check that your application runs in all browsers.
- Operating System Compatibility- To check that your web application is running smoothly on all major operating systems like Windows, macOS, Linux, etc.
- Mobile Compatibility- To ensure that your application runs on multiple devices and functions just as well on Android, the same as it does on iOS.
4. Security Testing
Security web testing is a crucial step in web app automation testing. This ensures that your application is protected against unauthorized access and harmful actions through viruses or other malicious software.
5. Interface Testing
Interface testing validates that all interactions are carried out smoothly and effectively between the web server and application server interfaces, and they are well connected.
6. Usability Testing
Usability web testing involves testing with a real user experience. It determines the app’s effectiveness and user-friendliness. While performing usability testing, testers must reveal specific critical issues users might face, like correct navigation, a site map, and avoiding over-crowded content.
Types Of Web Applications
A website is categorized into many types. To be more specific, we will discuss here the four main types. Different web testing techniques go with different types of sites. Let’s discuss them.
Overview:
- Simple Static Website
- Dynamic Web Application (CMS Website)
- E-commerce Website
- Mobile Website Testing
- Automated Web Testing Using LambdaTest
1. Simple Static Website
In a simple static website, the content is displayed the same for all visitors visiting the website at different times. This type of website is also known as an informational website. Here only developers can make changes that too in code only.
- This type of web testing has fewer functionalities and is larger depending on UI design. Testing a simple static website is very easy,
- The GUI designs that need to be checked include font size, color, style, spacing, and everything.
- Finding the broken links and checking the page links to see whether it is working properly or not.
- Checking that displaying images are correct and not broken or duplicated.
- Check the scroll bar carefully so that no unwanted scrolling appears or no scrolls get hidden( this may hide the content).
Apart from these, there are many more things to be tested on a static website.
2. Dynamic Web Application (CMS Website)
This is also known as CMS (content management system). This type of website involves frequent updates and changes in website content by the users. The dynamic web application is a combination of front-end and back-end programming.
Where the front-end uses HTML and CSS language and the back-end uses programming languages like PHP, Javascript, Angular, etc.
Web testing a dynamic web application is not as easy as testing a static website. Functionality testing is the most important thing to be performed in CMS website testing.
Apart from the points, we have covered in static website testing. This type contains much-complicated functionality for which testers need to be very careful while testing.
Points mentioned in static website testing are to be included while testing a dynamic web application also. Some additional points are-
- In the GUI section, all fields and buttons should be checked properly, and error messages and pop-up messages should be displayed if something goes wrong.
- In the functionality section, if the website has login/signup functionalities, then mandatory field validation, like form validation(acceptance of only numbers, not alphabets ) and character restriction on fields( the number of characters to be entered), is to be checked properly.
- Web testing the email functionality, document upload testing (a specific type of document to be uploaded), etc.
- Timeout for functionality, sorting functionality, and javascript are working on compatible browsers, etc. Each should be tested.
- In the back-end functionality section, checking whether text entering fields, and image uploading for broken images, are working properly or not. Also, adding new fields or deleting unwanted fields are also tested.
3. E-commerce Website
An e-commerce website is a bit complicated as compared to the above two. It consists of different pages and features for which the tester needs to be very cautious while in web testing.
For example, testers have to check the product detail page, like the category page, whether the shopping cart gets updated when a customer adds or deletes products, places an order, payment gateways, etc.
Another thing to check is the page that includes search functionalities, log-in details, and special offers. After applying the coupons, the site displays the discounted rate.
4. Mobile Website Testing
Web testing a mobile website is a more tiring task than testing other types of websites. For a mobile website, testers need to check cross-browser and cross-device compatibility. The site must run across devices, browsers, and operating systems.
Performance is another important factor to be considered for mobile website testing, but when tested on real devices then, performance-related issues can be tracked easily.
The site responsiveness is also tested to check whether it fits all types of devices without any sort of horizontal scrolling or not. Some of the other important functions to test also include text truncation, page scrolling, navigation, etc.
5. Automated Web Testing Using LambdaTest
Discrepancies are the interpretation of the different browsers that arise due to the different implementations. In the underlying browser engine.
By choosing a secure and reliable real device cloud like LambdaTest, you will link up your local environment to a range of more than 3000+ device, browser, and operating systems combinations to execute web browser tests, to make your testing feedback so much more valuable.
Lambda web testing is also a scalable cloud-based cross-browser testing platform. That is also designed for offering all mobile, website, and web app testing needed for cloud infrastructure. If scripted properly, it scales your tests easily to cover a wide range of device scenarios.
This platform helps you to ensure that your web app elements are rendered seamlessly spread across every desktop and mobile web browser with the support of manual, visual, and automated testing.
Wrapping It Up:
LambdaTest cloud allows parallel web testing and also supports integrations with some of the popular CI/CD tools, Jira, Jenkins, Travis CI, etc. It ensures smooth running automation testing of your web app with broader coverage. Its automated dashboard helps visualize the build status, sessions, queues, etc.
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