The Daily Feed Issue #28: What to test on your site

Welcome to Issue #28 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more. If you have questions about SEO, SEM or getting traffic, please post them to 503me.com (it's free).

Today I'm going to chat about what you should be testing on your site. Earlier this week I covered which browsers you should be testing in and yesterday we chatted about how to create a mobile test lab on a Mac or PC.

Always test the most important pages and components on your site the most. If you run a shopping website, test every page in your funnel all the way through checkout. On a typical shopping site that would include your home page, your product catalog, your shopping cart pages and your credit card page.

It sounds obvious that you should test the most important pages and functions the most, but often when you release a new feature, you'll focus on testing that specific feature and you might miss that it's broken your shopping cart and that you're going to be losing money for the next few days. 

When we release a new feature on Feedjit, no matter what it is we'll go through our checkout system and place a few orders in all major browsers we use for testing. Those orders cost us a few bucks in transaction processing fees, but it's worth doing the test to make sure we're not going to lose thousands of dollars in revenue.

When testing your site you should be looking for the following in all your test browsers:

• Site speed. I've chatted about this a lot so you already know how important it is and how to measure it. Different browsers use different rendering engines and javascript engines, so they'll perform differently.
• Javascript errors. Some browsers will generate errors on Javascript code that others will execute just fine. For example, Internet Explorer doesn't like certain javascript data structures that other browsers are OK with. So test them all.
• Rendering bugs - where the page doesn't look the same across all browsers. I find the most common issue is a site looking fine in Firefox and Internet Explorer 8 and it looks awful in Internet Explorer 7. Remember to check your site using IE8's compatibility mode.
• Applications that don't work e.g. check your commenting system and make sure the comments are posted and that they look the way you'd expect.
• On secure sites, make sure your SSL certificate is up do date and there are no browser warnings about insecure components on secure pages.
• Flash applications that don't run.
• Animations that slow down the browser too much.
• Check all your links to make sure they work. See below for more info:

One of the most common problems that even the pro's still encounter is dead links. One of the best dead-link checkers available is run by the W3C and it's completely free. You can find it on this page. It takes some time to run because they have put in a 1 second delay between each link checked, but it's worth the wait. At the end of the check you'll get a report at the bottom of the page showing dead links.

In general you should behave like a user on your own site. Don't take a mechanical approach to testing and keep your objectivity. It's easy to learn to ignore problems that make a big difference to someone who has never used your site. Always look at your site with fresh eyes and always work at constantly improving it.

Tomorrow I'm going to chat about why quality matters when marketing your site.

Regards,

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO.

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