The rise of mobile devices has been undeniable in today’s digitally-driven age. The surge in mobile website activities has led users to leverage the potential offered by smartphone devices of different sizes to tablets with varying resolutions to explore the internet.
The rise of mobile internet usage for web browsing makes it crucial for testers to focus on creating mobile-friendly websites with appealing, catchy; engaging website designs with seamless UIs. With this rise in mobile devices developers and testers face unique challenges in providing seamless web experience across a wide range of devices.
The diversity in screen resolutions and viewport sizes adds another layer of complexity to the mobile website testing process. This is where web device testing comes into play for ensuring a website’s consistent and optimal user experience, no matter which device it is accessed from.
In this article, we will discuss various aspects of web device testing including its benefits, why it is essential to focus on this testing, its limitations, and a few best practices for a better testing process. So let’s begin with what web device testing is.
What is web device testing?
Different devices read and display web content in varying ways. What looks perfect on one device might appear disjointed or misaligned on another. This is why web device testing not just becomes essential but imperative.
Web device testing is a form of testing websites or web applications to check if they perform uniformly across various devices with different screen resolutions. It essentially helps in verifying the performance and appearance of a website or web app across different mobile browsers like Chrome, Safari, Opera, etc, and their versions.
Offering mobile-friendly and responsive web designs on a myriad of mobile devices, leads to improved user engagement, and retention , thereby driving conversion rates.
Why is it essential to focus on web device testing?
The growing number of users who use content on different devices, clearly reveals how smartphones have become an inseparable part of human life. An increase in mobile device usage has also led to leaving desktop users behind. This as a result heightened user expectations as they access the website through their mobile devices and expect everything to be easily accessible.
Below are some reasons why web device testing is essential
- Since most devices have different screen resolutions, it requires optimization for the application to function across these various devices. Users may shift to other sites if the websites or web apps are not responsive on their devices.
- Popular search engines like Google rank mobile-friendly websites in the first place and show the site in the search results, thereby increasing the site’s chances of coming up on search engines. If the website is not mobile compatible, it will not appear on search results in the first few pages. Web device testing helps to find out if the website is mobile-friendly and takes up Google’s standards. It also helps to provide users with a flawless performance on popular screen resolutions.
- Since users browse on different devices that come with different screen resolutions. The priority is not performing testing on all ‘categories’ of devices available in the market. A wise thing to do is to understand what sort of devices users have so the team can focus on web development and testing for a selected category of devices.
- Performing web device testing helps to ensure the website’s experience and performance uniformly across the target devices and all screen resolutions, and fixes the issues encountered in the test process. It also helps in delivering an exceptional end-user experience across different mobile devices.
- For organizations striving to make an impact and establish their digital presence, they need to adopt the mobile-first approach to ensure that their website is of excellent quality.
- Ease of use is the primary reason why users prefer mobile devices over desktops or laptops. If a web page takes longer to load, a user may end up losing interest in accessing the website again. As part of the web device testing strategy, the test team can check and rectify the page load time, as well as test the website from different perspectives on varied mobile screen resolutions to see if the site’s performance speed is consistent across various devices.
- Aesthetics web page elements retain and attract users to websites. Outdated devices lack support for niche design features, therefore performing web device testing on devices widely used by the target users helps to ensure that the features work as intended.
Benefits of Web Device Testing
Mobile web testing provides several benefits to development teams with the following benefits:
- It enables test teams to optimize their website’s performance on multiple mobile browsers like Chrome, Safari, Samsung Internet, etc, thus ensuring browser compatibility.
- Allows developers to test their website on various mobile operating systems like Android and iOS and evaluate how a renders on these mobile browsers. This helps guarantee a glitch-free experience on the target device-browser-operating system combination.
- Optimizing websites for mobile devices enhances user-friendliness, which is crucial to attracting and retaining users and driving conversions. It also helps to achieve higher rankings on Google search engines, resulting in better visibility of web pages.
Limitations of Web Device Testing
Effective as it is, web device testing has its limitations as well:
- Since emulators cannot completely replicate the full spectrum of hardware differences among real devices, it potentially can mis device-specific issues.
- Variations in real-world network conditions, like slow or unstable connections, are challenging to mimic accurately in testing environments.
- Touch interactions and gestures are vital for mobile user experiences, which emulators can’t fully capture.
- Limited testing environments like limited device types, operating system versions, and network conditions can lead to potential oversights.
- Dynamic content and real-time interactions cannot be handled by emulators as precisely as real devices.
- Emulators may not accurately reflect mobile device performance, which can impact user experience.
- Despite these limitations, employing a combination of emulators, real devices, and real-world testing scenarios helps in maximizing web device testing effectiveness.
Best Practices for Web Device Testing
With many mobile devices providing sophisticated web functionality and frequent updates, it becomes a daunting task to tackle everything, consistently and continuously, to offer the best experience on all mobile devices. Even with an efficient testing team offering the best experience on all mobile devices is not a feasible task.
That is why implementing a thorough, effective, and up-to-date web testing strategy, and best practices are crucial to delivering a flawless web experience on hand-held devices for the target users.
Below are some of the best practices for web device testing that testers should follow while running a web test to ensure the high quality of their website or web application.
Perform cross-browser testing
A lot of the time, testers may skip testing the same website across many devices; instead, they only test the website on a single type of browser. They may wrap up testing by executing tests on the latest browser versions of all browsers. Due to this, testing issues in other browsers go unnoticed. The best practice here is that the website should be tested on many browsers and platforms to ensure compatibility and a consistent user experience, this provides insights as well as bugs on versions. To achieve this, testers can utilize automated cross-browser testing tools like LambdaTest.
LambdaTest is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform that allows testers to perform both manual and automated web device testing on real devices, browsers, and operating systems to scale up testing. The platform also allows testers to run both real-time and automation testing across more than 3000 environments, real mobile devices, and browser versions. Additionally, the entire web device testing activity can be expedited by running tests in parallel on different browsers, platforms, and real mobile devices.
By leveraging the LambdaTest cloud platform, testers can run cross-device testing on a wide range of real Android and iOS devices. Testers can also leverage device emulators for the website’s performance and user interface testing where the major focus areas are the website’s user interface, UX, and other aesthetic factors, helping in finding issues in the UI, UX, performance, and critical areas of the mobile website.
Additionally, LambdaTest can be seamlessly integrated with popular CI/CD tools like Jenkins, and CircleCI, project management tools like JIRA, and ALM, communication tools like Slack, and Microsoft Teams, and bug reporting tools like JIRA, and Bugzilla.
In short, LambdaTest is a scalable and secure platform that lets testers deliver a seamless mobile website experience to users. Along with website testing, the LambdaTest platform can also be used for mobile app testing, desktop testing, and API testing.
Include exploratory testing
Exploratory testing focuses on exploring the web application without any guidelines or strict pre-defined plans. Testers just open the web app like an end-user and keep exploring all the modules, while observing the behavior of the application.
Doing this they find many bugs that might never have been covered by automation or would never be covered. Including it in the testing phase can help testers debug issues that could have surfaced directly from an end user.
Take performance metrics
Another best practice is getting performance metrics associated with the web application. Only running performance tests is not enough, testers must also analyze these metrics to the standards.
For example, if a website takes longer to load than earlier then knowing the reasons for such variations is important for testers because if not taken seriously, they can eventually break the application.
Use automation wisely
Maintaining the right balance between automated and manual testing for web device testing is important. No doubt automation testing is a great solution for reducing time to market when releasing new features and functionality. Automating the wrong tests will cost more at the later stage not just in repeat testing and redevelopment but potentially in lost revenue and users due to glitches or non-functioning websites and apps. Therefore embracing both manual and automated testing will provide the best result while maintaining accuracy and consistency.
Develop a comprehensive test plan
Developing a good test plan is another good practice as it covers all aspects of the website, including functionality, usability, performance, security, and compatibility. The test scope, test cases, and expected outcomes must also be defined.
Perform load testing
Load testing is crucial to ensure that the website works properly under high load on different devices with varying resolutions while handling heavy traffic. load testing tools help testers simulate heavy traffic and measure the website’s responsiveness and other performance metrics.
Involve others in the testing process
Involving stakeholders, including developers, testers, and end-users, in the testing process, can assist in discovering flaws and enhance the overall performance and quality of the website across devices.
Validate HTML and CSS code
Following an automated approach for validating the website or web app code for the removal of potential HTML and CSS errors is essential. When it comes to checking the mobile-friendliness of the website W3C mobileOK checker, and Chrome DevTools are the handy ones. They help in checking and fixing issues related to a website’s HTML and CSS code and provide a detailed report about the failures on the website.
Conclusion
In conclusion, with the increasing complexity of web applications and the growing importance wide range of mobile devices, it can be said that testing the website for device compatibility and responsiveness has become an inseparable part of the web development process as it helps in ensuring the quality and reliability of web applications and driving a positive customer experience. Leveraging the above best practices developers and testers can ensure that web applications meet the expectations of users and stakeholders.
