The ongoing testing of your website is crucial to ensuring that it’s both compatible with different online standards, and that the user experience is as strong as possible. Primarily, it’s important to remember that a site is never going to be perfect, with continuous testing necessary to work out what improvements you need to make; this process can range from initial testing of a site, through to optimising it for SEO and conversion rate optimisation. With all these approaches, the end goal is a well designed and scalable site that can adapt to different devices over time.
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The first stage of testing a site involves validating HTML and CSS, as well as running tests on JavaScript and other plug ins. HTML and XHTML can be validated via a W3C app, which can also be used for CSS – this is particularly important to check for any missing code or problems with broken links. Speed tests and loading runs on sites can also give you a good indication of any issues that need to be fixed.
Content management systems can also be checked at an early stage of development; this software will allow a business to update their site without having to deal with overly technical aspects. CMS’s can be retested until you’re happy that it’s delivering the right results. At the same time, it’s important to look at the details of a page, from installing analytics software, to creating an RSS feed, and checking site maps.
You’ll similarly need to test out your site in different browsers, and on different devices, in order to check whether there any loading or compatibility problems. It’s also worth checking the loading time and features of a site on a slow connection, and how well a site runs when JavaScript is disabled. Sites now have to adjust to appearing on mobiles, tablets, and other devices – you can experiment here with testing responsive design, where CSS3 media queries and flexible grids enable automatic resizing of pages.
Testing is just as important when it comes to building up hits and conversions for your site, and for creating a strong SEO position. Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) can be used to run different versions of the same site for different users, with small changes used to develop A/B tests of which pages are leading to the most conversions. Landing Page Optimisation can work in a similar way, as can Visitor Behaviour Optimisation, where you can check to see what areas of a site users are accessing.
In terms of SEO testing, you’ll need to test the effectiveness of your HTML header tags and meta descriptions for pages, which will help to improve the crawlability of sites for search engines. Ongoing testing and improvement of SEO is crucial, from ensuring that CSS is simplifying your HTML presentation without obscuring content, through to checking internal navigation links to avoid any missed links.
Ongoing testing is therefore essential for any site, and there’s a strong argument to be made that you should never stop testing a site. Pages that don’t adapt and try to improve their conversions can find their Page Rank dropping on search engines, and can experience incompatibility problems with new browsers. In this way, keeping a continuous testing schedule in mind is necessary for improving your site.
About the author :
RS is runs a successful mail order company. She had increase success with website design from Deep Blue Sky.She can be found blogging about different marketing strategies to help improve sales online.
