How To Provide Quality Assurance To Your Website

When you launch a new website, there are various steps you must take and things you should check to ensure that it’s of good quality. Releasing a glitchy website that negatively affects the user experience will damage your online reputation and put current and potential customers off.

This is why website quality assurance (QA) must be implemented before a website is launched.

QA is the process of testing a website to find mistakes, errors, and oversights, with each test explicitly focusing on a specific area of the website, such as its security or its functionality.

When doing a QA, there are various common issues that you need to look out for and website quality check tools you can use that this article will cover. First, it’s important to understand the difference between QA and other types of website testing.

What Quality Assurance Isn’t

It’s important to distinguish that QA is not the same as user testing. Despite having the same end goal of improving the user experience (UX), the way these tests are conducted differs drastically.

User testing is done once the website is live and is conducted by observing how users interact with the website, analyzing what they do, and then surveying their opinions on the experience. The aim is to find aspects of the journey that are unclear and confusing for the user.

QA differs from this because it is done before the website is live by a single, in-house tester or internal teams and not users. Here the testers mimic different user actions to see if everything works as intended.

Another thing to note is that QA is not just functional testing. Although a big component of it is checking whether elements such as linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. and conversionA conversion is a desirable result on a website that leads to an action such as completing an order, filling out a form, or simply clicking on a link. events macros work , QA is also interested in assessing the quality of the website against the design requirements, testing the website’s performance, and checking its security capabilities, among other things.

Main Things To Check

An infinite number of processes and functions can be implemented into a website, meaning that you need to check almost an endless amount of things. However, to maximize the potential that your users have a good experience using the site, you want to at least check the following things to make sure that your website is in good health.

Consider these the crucial components that you can’t miss. Depending on the purpose of your website, there will be more things you need to check, as this list is not exhaustive, but doing these will ensure that you don’t miss any glaring issues.

1. Content Issues

With a large website, it can be hard to keep track of all your content, and you may likely have some outdated information on some of your pages that is harming the quality of your website.

When conducting QA, you need to go through all your content to ensure that the content you have is correct. Not only does this mean updating any information on your pages them, but it also includes searching for typos and spelling mistakes.

Enhancing and expanding on existing content is also crucial for this stage. Typically, long form content often does better in the SERPs as this responds to Google’s E-A-T signals. On average, a piece of content that ranks on page 1 of Google will have 1,447 words. However the primary aim is always ensuring you’re providing value to the user, quality beats quantity.

2. Broken Links

Broken links are one of the worst things that can affect the quality of your website. Links that lead to nowhere harm the UX, making you less credible to users, as a result this can also negatively affect your SEO, leading to poor ranking on search results.

It’s good practice to check your links regularly and fix them as soon as possible. Thankfully, there are website quality check tools that can help with this.

3. Website Speed

If your page struggles to load quickly, then that can be enough for users to leave your website and search elsewhere. It’s a good industry standard to ensure that all your pages load within 2 seconds. Each second after that threshold contributes to more people leaving.

You can check your website speed with various website performance tools, and once you find any that aren’t up to standard, you can take action like compressing images and streamlining code to help it load faster.

4. Contact Info

It’s estimated that 60% of all small businesses fail to have their contact details on all the pages of their website. This is a huge oversite as it makes it harder for customers to contact your business and continue their process down the sales funnel.

When conducting QA, look to ensure that each page has your address, email, phone number, and social links somewhere on it to make it easier for the customer to contact you. Furthermore, this should also help your local SEO ranking too.

5. MetadataPut simply, metadata is data that describes data. It’s a labelling system designed to help machines and humans understand what is contained within a packet of data. & Title Tags

Despite metadata and title tags being associated with Technical SEO practices, QA is a prime period to ensure that these are included on your web pages and are all up to scratch. Although these don’t impact the website that much, they help provide a better experience for users searching on search engines.

As title tags and meta descriptions appear in these search results and on social media shares, they indicate to users that the content matches their search intent, reassuring them that the page is relevant.

Top Tools To Use

Conducting QA without the appropriate website quality check tools is almost impossible. Here are some of the best tools you should get acquainted with to help you out during this process.

Monsido

Monsido provides a few different tools that can help in various aspects of QA. However, the one that stands out the most is their tool that helps with your metadata and title tags. This tool will quickly scan your entire website and alert you if any pages have missing meta descriptions, H1 tags, or title tags. This will allow you to ensure that each page is better optimized for search results.

As well as this, Monsido allows you to check your content for certain words or phrases, which can be useful when looking for outdated content. Its website quality assurance tool will also scan your website weekly to look for broken links. This makes Monsido a great all-around tool for website quality assurance.

CrossBrowserTesting

When testing the QA of your website, you cannot neglect to test both versions of your website, being the desktop and mobile versions. With more people searching the web vias their phones than any other device, it’s vital that you ensure that your mobile website is up to scratch.

CrossBrowserTesting is a great website quality check tool as it will allow you to check how your website runs on multiple browsers, be that Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Explorer, and 2040+ more.

SEOptimer

To test all the aspects of your website that contribute to SEO, including your link buildingLink building is a process of acquiring links pointing to your website. These links are obtained by creating content, participating in social media or commenting on other blogs., website speed, metadata, and more, SEOptimer is a great tool used by both experienced and beginner SEOs.

This tool will give you an easy-to-understand report on your website’s performance, giving you key data so that you know what needs to be improved and changed before the site goes live.

TestRail

TestRail is another great allrounder that can conduct QA on your website and manage your testing process as you go through it. It’s a great tool to keep you organized throughout as you can keep track of results and metrics, and it also integrates with a lot of different add-ons and widgets. Another bonus is that the software can be downloaded to your device or used entirely in the cloud, offering great flexibility.

Conclusion

The importance of QA can’t be overstated when building a new website or optimizing your current one.

The golden rule when conducting QA is that you run tests that ensure that the website is functional, performs well, has good security, and matches up to the requirements placed during the planning stages. If all of these are adhered to, it’s likely that you will have a good website.

Use the discussed tools to your advantage to help automate the process and make issues easier to spot, and then rectify any issues that cropped up. It’s also worth noting that website quality assurance is an ongoing endeavour and should be done regularly to make sure your website standards do not slip.