Why Should We Perform Website Automated Testing?
Websites and web applications are crucial to any business that wants to thrive in this digital age. Whenever prospective customers feel a need for your products and services, the first thing they will do is go to Google and search for your website.
So, to ensure smooth business operations, your website must be in its top condition 24/7.
To do that, you need to perform website automated testing regularly using automation testing tools like Tesults, Selenium, or Cypress.
After all, the last thing you would want is for customers to be unable to log in to your website or make a purchase because you neglected website testing and bug fixing.
In this article, you will learn the importance of performing automated website testing, and why your business should be doing it too.
What is Website Testing?
The meaning of website testing is pretty simple. It’s a software testing process that makes sure your website has no bugs and works efficiently with zero problems.
Website testing isn’t limited to checking only a website’s functionality. It also checks if the website or web application has any inherent security, technical, database, or other risks.
Here’s a list of some of the crucial aspects the QA team will check during the website testing:
- Functionality testing that checks:
- Website links
- HTML and CSS
- Forms
- Business workflow
- Cookies
- Interface testing involves checking:
- Messages
- System responses
- Database testing assesses:
- Data integrity
- Executing queries
- Response time
- Usability testing that evaluates:
- Content
- Site navigation
- Compatibility testing
- Security testing
- Performance testing
- Vulnerability testing
Why Do You Need to Run Website Testing?
As you already know, the website or web application of a business is a crucial element for its success.
So, if your business website doesn’t work properly, you will face some serious consequences, including a drop in website visitors, fewer clients, and lesser revenue.
The Walmart website crash case in 2020 during the PS5 sales is a good example of the results of not performing automated website testing.
During that time, the official website of Walmart kept crashing due to a sharp influx of website visitors who were looking to buy the PS5 console, which was just released. It happened despite their tech team’s best efforts to keep the website active.
As a result, the retail giant suffered a solid loss of nearly $15 million, according to several experts’ estimations.
It wouldn’t have happened if Walmart performed regular website testing. If they did, they would have discovered the problems that could occur due to a sudden influx of online traffic. This way, they could have taken proper measures to prevent this problem.
What Makes Website Automated Testing a Necessity for Businesses?
These days, when enterprises are adapting to agile and DevOps methods for web testing and development, running manual website testing will put your business way behind your competition.
Unlike automated website testing, the manual one needs humans to organize, write, and optimize the testing process. It takes a lot of time, resulting in a slow web development process.
So, to understand why automated website testing is necessary for your business, let’s take a look at the challenges of manual testing first:
-
The Huge Gap Between the Testing Speed and Web Development
Even though many businesses are embracing the CI/CD web development methods, most of them are still running manual website tests.
A 2021 Gitlab DevSecOps survey found that the slow speed of manual website testing is one of the biggest problems of CI/CD. It results in poor visibility among the development teams, duplicate web structures, and a lot of unattended bugs in the system.
-
Human Errors
We are only human, and humans make mistakes. However, errors made during the testing and development process of a website or application can result in serious issues for your business.
Let’s take visual testing as an example.
To create a better impact, the UI elements of a site or web application, such as color, fonts, shapes, or positions, must be flawless. However, a human tester who is performing manual testing can often miss the issues related to visual accuracy and differences.
You can easily avoid mistakes like this with website automated testing.
-
Compatibility Testing Challenges
You never know what browser or OS your customers are going to use while browsing through your website or web application.
That’s why the QA team needs to put the site or application through multiple compatibility tests for each major browser and OS, such as Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Edge, Safari, etc.
With manual testing, running compatibility tests through all these browsers and OS will take a lot of time, delaying the web production and launch.
-
Issues with Sudden Updates
With the deployment of CI/CD, businesses will have to roll out the updates for their websites and apps more frequently than ever. However, the speed of manual website testing is quite slow, so it might not be able to keep up with the updates.
The result – faulty development, unwanted bugs, and multiple errors.
-
No Collaboration
Manual testing is no longer a feasible option if you want to embrace the CD and Agile approach of web development. It will only cause slower bug trackings, late feedback, and little to no collaboration between the QA and development teams.
And this will only lead to more waste of time and resources.
On the other hand, if you use automated website testing, the QA team can provide timely feedback to the development team, who can fix the bugs in time to speed up the production of the website.
Benefits of Automated Website Testing
-
Automated Website Testing Saves Time and Money
The automated web testing tools can analyze the recorded interactions with the website and the users to craft suitable tests for the sites and applications.
After that, these tools can automatically run the optimized tests and send the results to the QA teams.
This way, the QA team won’t have to make manual modifications each time the dev team sends feedback or makes a change to the website, saving both time and resources for the companies.
-
Increases Your Coverage
Website testing is a complex and lengthy process. So, when the developers perform manual web tests, they often miss a lot of elements like data tables, internal programs, UI, and other parameters because of limited time and resources.
With proper automated web testing tools like Tesults, Selenium, or Katalon Studio, you can cover all those parameters without any extra effort to deliver better test results.
-
Improves Accuracy
Website testing is a repetitive and dull process. It’s such a tedious task that even the most sincere and single-minded tester can make mistakes.
However, with the right automation testing applications, you can execute these repetitive tests over and over, and record the results with more accuracy.
-
Helps the Developers and Testers
Test automation tools make even the most complicated tests like compatibility, cross-browser, and parallel testing easy and quick, which would have taken a lot of time and human resources if you did them manually.
It creates a quick and solid feedback loop between the QA and Dev teams, speeding up the production speed while reducing the development costs.
Perform Automated Website Testing Today!
To ensure smooth operation, you need to put your website through continuous tests. And even though manual testing might work for you, it will take a lot of time and resources to run, putting your development process way behind your competitors.
To avoid that, you need to perform automated website testing with the right automation testing tools.
With automated web testing, you can:
- Create a solid feedback loop between the QA and Dev teams, increasing the overall productivity of web development.
- Reduce possible human errors.
- Fix bugs faster.
- Reduce the web testing time and increase the number of tests without investing additional resources.
So, are you ready to perform automated web testing?
