How to Check Your Website or Online Store Tips for Separating the Best from the Rest
The quality of a website or online store is one of the key factors that can translate into the number of acquired customers or product sales. Before you pay for the work done - check its quality. Verify your provider with several free websites. Automated tests will point out the shortcomings of your application, which in turn will allow you to verify the correctness or speed of your website or store. If your application passes all the tests correctly, it will prove that the contractor did a good job. So what exactly are these tests for? I already answered! If the application does not pass the tests or the results are unsatisfactory, it will tell you that you definitely still need to work on the site.
I won't dwell here on the importance of the quality of the app's performance, I'll do that in another post. Ominously, I will only mention the stores and sites that had to be created from scratch, because the amount of solutions used and the smoothness of operation forced the owners to abandon the current solution. You, however, have an advantage, this article can save you from losing a lot of money, and who knows, it may even save your business in the future!
Testing tools:
Before we begin, remember a principle: Testing proves the presence of errors, not the absence of them
. That is, with the help of a test we can prove that a store or website is not correct, but we will not prove in this way that it 100% is. Even simpler? Go ahead! If all the test results turn out to be correct, it proves that the probability of errors on the site is low. If, on the other hand, the results of the tests performed are not correct, it means that your application definitely contains errors that absolutely must be eliminated.
PageSpeed Insights (PSI)
In my opinion, this is an absolute game changer if we are talking about code quality. The code of the site should strive for simplicity, speed and optimization. There was about it in books, there was in studies, they wrote about it on forums, but it's like a pea against the wall. And suddenly boom. A message pops up saying that certain components of PageSpeed Insights will be taken into account when determining a page's position in search results (says this entry) and all of a sudden everyone starts checking what score their site has on WordPress. Exposed to the test, site developers have so far been covering up reality with slogans like "our business model is different" or "it won't change anything" or the total departure of "I wonder how much Google has in this ranking." - as if Google has to fight for position...
Check what score your site is getting: PageSpeed Insights
In the field for entering the URL, put the link to the site or store you want to test, and then click "analyze." The tool has an intuitive interface that will point out the flaws in the application under test.
The W3C Markup Validation Service
This is an inlidator that checks the correctness of tags, among other things, in HTML documents. The test will allow us to determine whether a website or online store has syntax errors. In a nutshell: it is a syntax correctness check according to a set of established rules. If you can't imagine a newspaper article with spelling errors, you should take a similar approach to your site. The type and severity of the error should be interpreted on a case-by-case basis in relation to the code as a whole.
Check your site: W3C Markup Validation
In the URL field, put the link of the site or store you want to check, and then click "check". If you have trouble interpreting the results, feel free to contact us on Telegram.
HTML 5 Outliner
The tool is used to check the structure of headings on your site. The application has a few flaws, so its result should be purely indicative. Personally, I use solutions implemented for developer tools and I recommend such as well, but HTML 5 Outliner is quite easy to use, which is why I included it here. With this tool, we can easily check how many top-level headers we have or whether the structure of our content on the page has been implemented correctly. As I mentioned before, the tool should not be used as an indicator of the quality of the content structure, because it is very common for a site to have sample content or for a programmer to leave matters of semantics to the person who will do the SEO - so you need to keep this in mind.
Test your site: HTML 5 Outliner
In the box for entering the URL, put the link to the site or store you want to test, and then click "Outline this!". Next, the structure of the content of the application under test should appear. It should be consistent and logical.
Mobile optimization testing tool
This is a Google tool that will allow us to check whether a site is responsive i.e. adapted to the screens of mobile devices. In practice, the tool checks: whether the site fits on the screen of mobile devices, whether the area of the site adapts to the screens, and whether the font on the site is not too small, which could make the content difficult to read. The mobile optimization test is relatively easy to pass, but if your app doesn't pass it you should correct existing errors as soon as possible.
Test your site: Mobile optimization testing tool
In the box to enter the URL, put the link to the site or store you want to check, and then click "Check URL". If the mobile optimization is correct, you should get a message: "The page is adjusted for mobile".
Summary
Here are four tools to pre-check the quality of your website or online store's workmanship. Remember to also ask for the opinion of another professional, unrelated to the application, despite positive results. You can write to me here (telegram) or ask on one of the online forums. In addition, if the tests are not successful, don't let yourself think that they are meaningless scripts.
Enjoy testing!