Website Testing Checklist

These days merely having a website isn’t enough. Good organizations develop websites that are informative, accessible as well as user-friendly. In order to achieve and maintain all these qualities, web platforms should be well tested. This process is known as web-based application testing. I’m going to introduce the website testing checklist that somehow guarantees a higher quality of the software product.

Website Testing Checklist

Web testing checklist helps to test websites and web applications for finding out possible bugs and providing the website QA. This website test checklist is important to follow both for developers and quality assurance providers. Some companies put all the responsibility on the QA specialists. However, if the developers’ team is aware of all the testing techniques the code will be cleaner and the final product — more functional. Web app testing process includes:

✔ Functionality Testing
✔ Usability testing
✔ Interface testing
✔ Compatibility testing
✔ Performance testing
✔ Security testing

I’m going to explain each of these testing directions in detail. Come on!

Website Testing Checklist #1 Functionality Testing

Functionality testing pretends to check the site for links, database connections, forms, cookies, etc.

✔ Validation Testing

One of the most critical points to consider is the HTML / CSS. You should make sure that the valid HTML is used for the website.

✔ Link testing includes:

Internal links: These are links that are pointing to the pages of the same websites. Internal link testing makes sure that the links in the website properly link to the expected pages.

External links: These links take from the website under the test to any other web platform.

Outgoing links: Outgoing links are the contrary of the external links. These links come from any kind of page and take to the specific domain under test

Email links: such links are used to send emails to the admin or other users of the web page

Broken links: these are links that don’t work because the page they take doesn’t exist any longer, or there are errors in the URL. These broken links may refer to all the above-mentioned types of links

✔ Forms testing includes:

• all of the validations on each field
• default values of the fields
• wrong inputs in the forms to the fields

Web forms are considered to be one of the most commonly used parts in the website testing checklist. Let’s take an example when a user fills an inquiry form and clicks on the button of “Submit”. Sometimes the details do not get captured correctly and get lost. In order to prevent it, forms’ functional testing makes sure they are consistent and contain all the required input and output controls. As a result, the data is properly captured.

✔ Cookies Testing

Cookies are files that are stored on the user machine and used to maintain the session (this is especially related to the login sessions). These files of personalized user information are considered to be unique identifiers due to which the websites remember users for a given period.

The testing process is implemented by enabling and disabling the cookies in the browser options. The testing includes:

• login sessions
• user stats after the session ends
• the effect on the application security after deleting the cookies

✔ Database Testing

With the development of innovative technologies, web applications become more and more complicated. To make sure that you deliver a functional website it will be better to introduce a complex database schema. In order to provide a good quality website that handles effective data processing, you need to validate the databases.

✔ Error Message Testing

Error messages are very essential as they guide the users and help them to navigate the website and find the answer to their questions. If error messages don’t work properly, the user may get confused and fail their action.

✔ Required / Optional Field Validation Testing

Both the required and optional fields should be handled effectively. The web application should never let the user submit until all the required fields are filled in. Yet, there should neither be restrictions of filling in the optional fields.

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