This ad hoc approach to testing means that it is possible to miss large sections of functionality and not be able to fully consider all permutations or variations of events and actions that need to be tested.

For most websites, there is a fairly long list of items that need to be tested as part of any new website development and in order to know what to test, when you tested it and whether those tests passed or failed, it is best to make a proper plan.

We are going to show you how to write a simple and straightforward test plan, which will provide a more systematic method for testing your website but the process outlined below is still essentially a manual one. We are not yet moving into using software tools to help identify and run tests, nor are we covering automated testing here, although I hope to write a post on these aspects in due course.

Writing A Test Plan

A typical test plan should identify all the areas of the website that you need to test before it launches, which you then follow through to conduct your testing, making notes of when you completed the test and adding any bug or issue reports to your bug tracking software along the way.

Start off with getting all the main sections down in a spreadsheet, divided between front end and admin or CMS if the website has one.

Then, start to break each main section down into the constituent parts that you need to test, concentrate on the important parts of the website first such as the home page, which is likely to be one of the most visited pages and the main areas of functionality, which are most likely to be the most used.

For instance, in the case of an ecommerce site, this would include individual tests for items such as adding products to the shopping basket, removing products from the shopping basket, updating the shopping basket quantities, being able to enter the checkout process and completing the checkout process (depending on your website there may be several steps to test within the checkout process).

You should be asking yourself questions for when you start testing the checkout process from the point of view of the user such as:

• Can I complete my order?
• Can I go back and amend my order?
• Do I understand where I am in the checkout process?
• Can I clearly see what I am ordering and how much it will cost, including delivery and taxes?
• Do I get a receipt or email confirmation?

As the owner of the website there will be different questions such as:

• Does the payment processing work correctly?
• What happens if the incorrect card details are entered?
• Does the order confirmation process work correctly?

And so on, when putting a testing plan together you are testing the website from the point of view of the user and also from the point of view of the owner or operator of the website. You may also have specific usability testing lined up but the primary reason for the test plan as far as this blog post is concerned is to test the functional aspects of the website to ensure they work correctly. Does the website do what it says it does? For instance, if the checkout process displays the order details including taxes and delivery then does it show the correct details for both tax and delivery?

Another important area to test is the site search or product search, as this is likely to be used a lot on the website.

Make sure that you test all the forms within the website, such as enquiry forms and newsletter signup forms. Test that the form can only be submitted after the mandatory fields have been completed and that the form is emailed to the correct email address or saved to the database correctly.

Once you go through and think about each section of the website along the lines of the above then you should have compiled a decent list in your spreadsheet of areas and items to test. Add columns for each browser that you need to test each item on, which will be the web browsers that you have agreed to support as part of the project. This would normally cover the major web browsers such as IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox 3, Chrome and Safari but may include others too depending on the usage of your target market (or existing audience if you have those statistics). There are a range of browser checking tools that can help you with this aspect.

For the admin system or CMS that powers the website, add a row to your test plan for each function. Going back to our ecommerce example, this means that there would be tests for add new product, edit existing product, remove product, view order, edit tax rate, etc. depending on what the system was capable of.

You could break these tests down further to test individual elements of adding a new product. For instance, is there validation present to check that mandatory fields are filled in when adding a product? Does the product image have to be a certain size or dimensions? Does the product title have to be shorter than a certain number of characters? All these items could occupy separate rows in your test plan.

Of course, if you were to break your test plan down to this extent for a large website or CMS then the result will be a long spreadsheet of items to test, which will take a great deal of time to test effectively. You will need to decide whether you have the time available to test in this level of detail or if some areas can be tested more quickly.

A few other items that you may wish to make sure you have as part of every test plan are the following, in no particular order:

• Ensure your HTML and CSS code validates to W3C guidelines
• Test accessibility of the website
• Test the SEO items that you have planned for to make sure they are in place
• Test against the specification for the project that was signed off to ensure that everything has been completed that was agreed
• Test against designs and/or wireframes or prototype html mockups that were completed to make sure the finished website matches the signed off designs or wireframes
• Take into account any changes requested (should be in the form of change control documents)
• Complete any security tests that are required

You may wish to have a look at our list of 10 different forms of website testing to make sure you have covered everything. The list can go on indefinitely, there is always something that can be tested a bit more, but at some point it has to be halted at a relevant point otherwise the testing will never get done.

List or Flow Chart?

Some aspects of the website lend themselves to having a flow chart in place that describes all the permutations or possibilities that need to be tested. This is especially helpful if one action then presents another set of possibilities. When testing without a flow chart it can become extremely difficult to remember which permutations you have tested and which you have not.

Having a flow chart or mindmap worked out that shows you all the possibilities allows you to think more clearly about what you are testing, what you expect the outcome to be and understand what you have tested and what is remaining to test.

Conclusion

If there is too much testing to do for one person then divide it up amongst other people with instructions on what you want testing and what to do with bugs when they are found. Make sure they follow their bit of the test plan and feed back on what they find, handing bugs to you or inputting them into your bug tracking software themselves.

As you test then fill in the test plan to show what you tested and when. If you keep the document client friendly then it can be shown as proof of what testing was completed prior to launch.

Testing is a vital part of any website development and having a decent plan before you start testing saves a great deal of time and effort whilst making sure that all the required testing gets done.

At the moment that testing subject of choice is known as Conversion Rate Testing, or sometimes called CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation). This would normally mean that the tests being carried out are Split Tests or Multivariate Tests, using software such as Google Weboptimizer.

Don’t get me wrong, conversion rate testing is really important and can greatly increase the number of conversions on a particular page, which can raise sales, enquiries, profits or whatever aspect of conversion you are trying to improve.

But there are other forms of testing websites, quite a few in fact, and some that are quite basic that get overlooked. I wanted to give a brief description for each type of testing to help you understand all the areas that can (and should) be tested when launching a new website, rolling out a set of updates or at least checking on a regular basis.

Different Forms of Testing

Functional testing

This form of testing aims to ensure that the website works correctly or as it was intended to. You click on a link, does the website display the correct page? You complete a search, does the website return the correct search results? You add a product to the basket, does the website add the correct product to the basket? Functional testing is going through the entire website, including content management system or admin area, to make sure that each function within the website is performing as it should be.

Browser compatibility testing

Different web browsers display web pages differently from each other. This is one of the least helpful aspects of the Internet and browser compatibility testing or browser checking involves testing the website on each of the major browsers (or each browser that you have decided to support), which generally includes IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox 3, Chrome, Safari 3 and Safari 4 on both PCs and Macs. You could possibly include Opera 9 and Opera 10 in that list in addition to testing your website on Linux as well as Windows and OSX. You could also check your analytics to see which browsers are most commonly visiting your site. There are several decent browser checking tools listed in our testing tools directory.

Usability testing

Usability testing assumes that your website works correctly and displays in each major browser correctly. However, a website that functions correctly is not necessarily a usable website for your target audience. Usability testing enables you to show your website to a group of users, ask them to perform certain actions and see how they accomplish those tasks. There are many reasonably priced usability testing tools on the market that have made this type of testing much more straightforward, many of which are listed in our testing tools directory. It is possible to gain great insight into how people actually use your website and a lot of the experts agree that you can pick up most usability issues when testing with only 5 users.

Accessibility testing

Accessibility testing is extremely important to make sure that your website complies with best practice and accessibility guidelines plus legislation surrounding accessible websites, which is in force in both the US and UK. In the US there is Section 508, which is part of the Rehabilitation Act and in the UK we have the Disability Discrimination Act or DDA. A fully accessible website not only benefits those users that would otherwise have difficulty using your website but search engines will also be able to navigate and understand your content more easily, thereby helping your search engine rankings. To help you test your website’s accessibility there are some accessibility testing tools available in our directory although manual testing is still recommended.

Performance testing

Performance testing is an area that has always been important but possibly even more so now that Google is starting to incorporate the performance of a website into its ranking algorithms. There used to be an 8 second rule, which believed that a user will wait no longer than 8 seconds for a page to download before they click back and try another website. That rule is a long way out of date, it is now no more than 1 or 2 seconds. Performance testing can show you when your website is slowing down, which pages are taking time to load and what element of the page is causing the problem. Performance testing tools are covered in our testing tools directory.

Stress or load testing

There is a difference between stress and load testing in that stress testing concerns itself with trying to break the system you are testing whilst load testing aims to find out how much volume you can put through the system. Both of these forms of testing are generally for larger websites and web applications. A range of stress and load testing tools can be found in our testing tools directory.

Site monitoring

A really simple test that you can put in place is to automatically monitor your website to check for downtime or outages. Nobody likes a website to be down including users and search engines. Regular downtime will lower confidence in your website and they could be affecting your traffic levels and therefore sales or enquiries without you knowing. A selection of site monitoring tools can be found in our testing tools directory.

Conversion rate testing

The current favourite form of testing, and an important one too. Conversion rate testing or optimisation can greatly improve the amount of visitors your website converts into enquiries and/or sales. If your SEO brings in 100 visitors a day and your site currently converts 5 of those into becoming customers then, with successful conversion rate testing, you could convert more visitors into customers and make more sales. Conversion rate testing normally takes the form of running split or multivariate tests on your website, many of which are listed in our testing tools directory.

Security testing

Websites can have security holes that could be extremely damaging for your business if they were to be found and exploited. Security testing aims to find where those security holes exist so that you can do something about them.

Spelling and Grammar checking

It is always useful to fully read through all text on the website to ensure there are no typos or grammar mistakes. You will also spot how you can improve the readability of text and other areas that perhaps need some attention. Also make sure you read through all messages that appear when signing up for a newsletter, adding products to a basket, or registering including any error messages. Simple changes to the wording of an error message into a nicely worded error message can make a big difference.

So there you have it, website testing can take on many forms and all of them should be completed to a greater or lesser degree. At least by completing each type of testing you can be aware of any issues or areas for improvement so then properly plan out what action you are going to take and when. Good luck with whatever testing you complete.