Website Testing Checklist

Launching a new website or a redesigned one is quite a daunting task. It takes a lot of team efforts and time to execute it successfully. Close and effective coordination among all the people involved in this campaign is vital. Here are some of the essentials you would require as a website testing checklist to inspect thoroughly before your website becomes live.

Optimize your images

Make sure all your images are optimized. They should not be too big in size and should be compressed properly. They should all have an alt tag which is quite significant from a SEO point of view. They shouldn’t be site speed draining and preferably labelled.

Site Speed

Google considers website page loading speed a critical factor for determining search engine rankings. If you use WordPress, many Plugins are available for checking and maintaining website loading speed. It is a fact that website speed influences conversion rate and the number of visitors. Google Page Insights is available for testing your website speed and to go into details for improving upon it.

Ensure that your Website is Mobile friendly

Companies who have responsive and mobile friendly turn out to have more visitors and leads ultimately leading to more revenue. They have an edge over the ones which still don’t have responsive web designs. Google does reward mobile friendly websites which leads to this conclusion.

Testing all the links

It is extremely important to test each and every link on your website to ensure that it is indeed going to the correct destination it is supposed to go. There shouldn’t be any broken links within the website. In case if you are redirecting your website, it becomes all the more important that your entire website gets redirected.

Forms and Spelling/Punctuation

Make sure that there is a proper flow within all the forms available on your website and whether the form once sent gets to the correct person. It is essential to ensure that the formatting is consistent throughout the website without any flips. Give a lot of significance to ensure that all the spellings used are correct in the content but also within the titles and headers and contact forms through your website. Break large text blocks into smaller paragraphs.

Cross Browser Checking

Another element in the website checklist is to do cross browser checking. You must ensure that the website is working perfectly in all the major browsers. It is important that it works across all the browsers such as Chrome, Safari, Mozilla and Internet Explorer. Everything should be working perfectly and smoothly without any glitches.

Adding Sitemap

Adding a sitemap to the root directory enables the search engines to index your website easily. XML Sitemaps website creates a sitemap.xml file after which you can upload it. In case you use WordPress, Google XML Plugin can be installed. Also, the website need to be added to Google Webmaster Tools and this provides a lot of information about when your site was last indexed.

Google Web Master Tools

This is now known as Google Search Console. It is a precious tool for all the webmasters. You can monitor your site’s performance and submit content for crawling and also monitor your back links. If anything is wrong with your website, Google will communicate that to you through this Google Console. It includes features such as manual penalties, crawling errors etc.