How to Test a Website Before Launching?

Launching or development of an impressive website live is not really tough. When you have designed a website, & everything looks fine and you're satisfied; you make it live. There are so many experts involved in developing a website. The tasks are divided for Editors, Designers, Developers, SEO and Network Administration Team.

Here we are covering some aspects to keep in mind, before launching your website finally.

For Editors and Writers

1. Spelling, grammar, and punctuation

Check your content carefully to be sure that it doesn't have any spelling, typos, and grammatical errors site-wide. Rather, just checking headlines and text, go for check everything included navigation, call-to-action, forms etc.

Text correctness matters to determine the ranking of webpages in search engines.

2. Forms

Fill out the forms on the site to follow the following questions:

Can the flow be improved?

Do you get stuck?

Are the instructions accurate?

Does completely filled form go to the right people, person or destination?

3. Check images

Check to make sure that all images are optimized wisely for the web. Be ensure that it’s not too large and does not affect the site performance and load time. Also, make your images properly labeled with relevant titles and alt-text.

4. Context

This needs a great experience to determine what's good for your users, and ask this to yourself?

Why should I visit this page?

Is the content ready and good enough for the visitors?

Does the page carries information which user requires?

Make your web pages contextual and specific and make it more user-friendly for your users, so that they can easily know what kind of information page carries.

For Web Designers

5. Site Speed

Check the page size of your webpages and must check how much time your it requires to load; you can use Google's own site speed test tool to do so. Google measures site speed to determine your webpages rankings and now site speed becomes a recommended and important factor of SEO ranking.

6. Mobile Friendliness

Is your website mobile-friendly? If not, then do it, and obviously, it’s really not easy to develop a multi-device compatible website, but some great steps can make your website to render and scale multi screens. You can again use Google's Mobile-Friendly Test for help.

7. Compatibility

Check to make sure that your website is compatible and renders wisely in all common browsers. Browser compatibility is also a great way to measure your website success.

8. Fonts and Formatting

Sometimes, code gets appeared into the content or somewhere on the page, or else a word or letter looks funny or different. Check your formatting or make it consistent and remove the odd pips from the copy.

9. Navigation

Check your website navigation to find out every single breaking to make sure that website leads to wherever it means to without having any broken links or inaccurate pages. Use a proper navigation structure and link your pages with proper relevancy.

Also, make sure that your website's internal search works fine and delivers good relevant results.

For the Web Developers

10. Live URL's

Websites built with a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) having a set of certain webpages and every live site has several live URL's and you need to check whether all the URLs are working or not. If your website has fewer webpages, you can navigate and check it manually to find out the obstructions.

But, what if your website has more than 500 pages? You can use some tools to check and find URL's error. There are some paid tools available at the modest fee to check urls.

11. Signup at Google Search Console

Google Search Console (Previously: Google Webmaster Tools) is a free online tool used by webmasters to measure the health status of webmasters to find the issues in website (crawl errors, manual penalties, 404 page errors, hacked websites, malware detected etc.)

Search console also lets you check and monitor your website's performance, issues identifications, crawl requests, removal of content that you don’t want to be indexed, search queries and monitor backlinks and much more.

12. Minify

Minify is a technique to compress website codes into smaller chunks to speed up your website. Check your website carefully and use minify where code compression is required.

13. 404 Pages

When a webpage displays 404 error, it means that the page has been moved or deleted. And when 404 error is displayed, it's better to create a custom 404 error page and help your visitors to land on other specific target pages. It will help you to hold the visitors on your website for some more time.

14. Favicon

Favicons are little icons displayed in address bar or tabs in your browser, it shows your brand logo to give a little bit credit and recognition to your brand. It better to use a relevant favicon when you make your website live.

For SEO Team

SEO professionals have a great understanding of web marketing facts and fundamentals of how search engines work. They can help the website to make it more visible with several improvements tips.

They can find several issues in the website like title, descriptions, redirections, sitemaps, tools configurations, XML, HTML sitemap integration, social media optimization. SERP displays and several off page SEO activities and SMO activities.

There are also have paid SMO, PPC, Digital Marketing activities to instantly boost up your website visibility.

Conclusion

Well, I hope you've gone through with factors I have mentioned above and everyone in a web and marketing team have their certain tasks assigned, and hope that this combined testing approach will help you to tear down all the loopholes you've to find in the website testing before make it live.

There are so many factors you need to check, but here, there are some important factors that need serious attention.

So, before launching your website, make sure to check that your website does not have these issues and have great looks and features.

Thanks for giving your time!