There are hundreds of services to help you launch successfully
Once your webstore is ready to go it’s time for some last minute checks before launch. There are a number of different elements that you can test on a webstore and getting them right is important.
In this article we will:
• List some of the functions that you should hope to test before you launch
• Send you in the direction of some tools that can test your site
What should you be testing?
You want to create the best possible site for your customers so testing its functions before you open up to the world is wise.
Rendering on different devices
The way people conduct their online shopping is changing and more shoppers are accessing shops via mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. This means you should make sure your site looks good and works across all devices.
Mobiletest.me: Simply enter your site URL and the app will show you what your site looks like on mobile devices. Allows you to choose which device you’d like to test on.
Mobitest: This allows you to conduct a performance test on each device so you can test your site’s speed on mobiles too.
CrossBrowserTesting: This allows you to check your site across 130 different browsers including mobiles. Handy if you want to see how your site performs across everything not just mobile.
Usability
You need to make sure that when your customers come to your site – they know what to do and where to go. A site which is hard to navigate and and buy from isn’t going to do well. There are a number of online tools which will test your usability.
FiveSecondTest: This site allows you to upload a screen shot of your site and see what users make of it. There is a diverse pricing strategy with some free options.
Silverback: This app tests the usability of your site on Macs only. It lets you create tests and video users in action. It has a free one month trial so no investment needed at first.
ConceptFeedback: This doesn’t test usability as such but gets feedback on the look and feel of your site from a community of experts.
Speed:
Online shoppers are an impatient bunch. If your site isn’t loading fast enough, you can’t expect them to hang around – after all there are a plenty of other sites to go to. Google also doesn’t like slowly loading sites and will penalise you if your site isn’t performing quickly enough.
GooglePageSpeed Insights: You may as well go straight to the search engine master if you are going to do some testing – after all it will be the one penalising you if you get it wrong. It tests your speed and then makes recommendations as to how to improve.
Pingdom: Much like Google, Pingdom will identify problem areas in your site’s speed and show you how to resolve these issues.
LoadImpact: This site helps you with load testing and performance testing which can help to give you a more rounded impression of how your site is doing.
SEO
If your site is going to succeed it needs to do well in SEO. If you can improve your site’s crawlability it will become more visible to users searching for your products. There are a great number of ways to improve your SEO, testing it will hopefully give you an idea of where you should start.
SEO Site Check Up: This application will give you quite a thorough analysis of your SEO for free. It checks plenty of elements including your backlinks, page statistics and meta tags.
Google Webmaster Tools: Once again, going to the king of search engines to check your SEO is a good idea. Hearing from the horses mouth what is wrong is a great help. It crawls your site for errors, duplicate content and site indexation status.
Open Site Explorer: Powered by industry favourite SEOMoz this tool will scan your site and track your SEO such as outbound links etc. There’s a free version and a paid version with more features.
Speak Your Mind