Website quality assurance testing is essential to ensure that businesses’ websites are functional, secure, and user-friendly.
According to Google, around 77 percent of users abandon a website due to poor performance and errors, while 47 percent expect web pages to load in two seconds or less according to Kissmetrics. This shows a slow website cannot win new customers.
This comprehensive guide will explore the QA testing process, including the benefits, types, tools, and best practices you need to improve your software quality.
What is Website QA Testing?
Website quality assurance testing identifies bugs and errors that might have been missed during a website’s design and development phases.
Usually, testing a website’s QA is to ensure compliance with the specified standards while identifying deviations and irregularities. And also to reduce friction and other “conversion killers.”
Portent research shows websites that load in 1 second have a 3x higher conversion rate.
What are the types of website QA testing for SaaS and B2Bs?
Site speed is not the only factor that determines a website’s quality. There are various testing methods to test different aspects of a website. The end goal is to ensure a frictionless user experience and optimal performance of the entire website.
The various types of website testing include:
1. Manual website QA testing
Manual website QA testing involves hands-on testing without using automated scripts and tools.
In this case, testers act like end-users, exploring and interacting with the application’s features for potential defects manually.
Manual testing allows quality engineers to judge a site’s performance from a human point of view while making subjective discoveries they might have missed through automated testing.
However, it’s time-consuming, expensive, and difficult to scale.
2. Website functional testing
Functional testing is a type of website testing that assesses the functions of a website by testing it against standard requirements. It’s to ensure the compliance of the website with the desired specifications. This includes:
- User login, registration, and verification processes
- Data input, processing, and storage processes
- UI-server-database communications
- Account recovery processes
- Multifactor authentication process
- User roles and permissions
- Search functionality and filtering options
- Form submission
- Content display and formatting
- Shopping cart and checkout procedures
- Payment processing systems
3. Website usability testing
Usability testing involves testing the ease with which users can navigate and interact with your website. It ensures your website is intuitive and user-friendly.
Accessibility testing is a popular subset of usability testing. It checks for the ease of use of a website’s features by people with disabilities, such as color blindness, hearing loss, old age, etc.
4. Automated website testing
Automated QA testing involves using automated testing scripts, tools, and frameworks to verify an application. It involves simulating repetitive user behavior, such as clicking buttons, navigating menus, and entering data, while comparing the outcomes with standard results to reveal potential defects.
A recent Kobiton report revealed that 97 percent of companies adopted automated testing to improve user experience and app functionality and speed up time to market.
Leveraging AI QA tools is a quick way to automate website testing with little or no human intervention.
5. Mobile website testing
Mobile website testing involves verifying a website’s performance on mobile devices.
According to Statista, around 96.3 percent of global users use mobile phones to access the internet. Clearly, any SaaS or B2B digital product neglecting the mobile landscape is losing millions of potential users and revenue streams daily.
Mobile website testing includes testing for:
- Touchscreen navigation and interactions
- Responsive design and layout adjustment
- Readability and ease of use on smaller screens
6. Cross-browser testing
Cross-browser testing ensures a website or digital product functions appropriately across multiple browsers and devices.
Although not applicable to all, a website must support slightly older browsers that may not support all the latest CSS/JS features.
7. Website security testing
Website security testing is the process of validating and verifying the effectiveness of a web application’s security controls against cyberattacks. It actively analyzes the application for weaknesses, vulnerabilities, or technical flaws.
A common security testing technique is called Penetration testing.
Website penetration testing, also known as ethical or black-box testing, involves simulating the behavior of a cyber-attacker to detect security vulnerabilities in an application software.
Leveraging our extensive experience in security testing, we drafted the following SaaS security testing checklist to fortify your application:
Data Encryption Checks:
- Ensure stored data is encrypted with industry-approved methods, such as SHA, RSA, or AES
- Review compliance and robustness of key management processes
- Ensure proper segmentation and different encryption of sensitive data
- Ensure proper encryption of transmitted data with secure and updated protocols, such as HTTPS, SFTP, TLS, and SSH
- Review potential weak encryption algorithms in use
Penetration Testing:
- Try bypassing user authentication systems to measure their resilience
- Investigate server vulnerabilities to identify potential system compromises
- Simulate data breach scenarios
- Evaluate the possibility of Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) and Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks
- Probe for susceptibility to OS, SQL, and other types of injection attacks
- Probe for hidden functionalities or exposed internal interfaces
Session Management Checks:
- Ensure proper session termination after inactivity or logout
- Evaluate session timeouts’ effectiveness and security
- Assess susceptibility to session fixation or replay attacks
- Ensure session tokens are securely generated and stored
- Verify the binding of sessions to specific attributes, such as User Agent or IP to prevent hijacking
Vulnerability Assessment:
- Identify outdated software libraries
- Check for unnecessarily open ports or unprotected services
- Assess malicious file uploads or code injection potentials
- Scan for accessibility to sensitive data
- Review the settings overly permissive configurations
- Check for insecure data transmission and data storage methods
To avoid being overwhelmed, you can leverage AI QA testing tools like QA.tech to get the job done quickly with little or no human intervention.
8. User Acceptance Testing (UAT)
User acceptance testing is the final and most important testing stage in the software development lifecycle (SDLC).
It is performed manually by people before product release to identify bugs and defects.
UAT is divided into two: Alpha and Beta testing. Both rely on feedback and aim to improve product quality.
Alpha testing is performed after all other tests in a controlled environment by an internal QA team to identify bugs or defects. It’s to ensure the software quality in a live and real environment.
Beta testing is the last phase of the software quality assurance process, where a select group of end users tries out the application. It aims to measure user satisfaction and identify bugs from multiple user interactions.
What are the Benefits of Website QA Testing for SaaS and B2Bs?
Around nine out of 10 online users abandon a website after a negative experience, leading to lower customer retention and revenue.
This shows that robust software testing is crucial to the success of any SaaS or B2B company.
Let’s explore the benefits:
1. Increased Brand Reputation and Trust
A professional and functional website portrays a sense of reliability and trustworthiness while increasing positive brand perception.
Chris Anderson, the brains behind TED Talks, reminds us that, “your brand isn’t what you say it is – it’s what Google says it is.”
This shows the importance of online reviews. A single negative review can lead to a 51.4% drop in purchase probability and cause a business to lose up to 30 customers.
QA testing can help detect defects that may mar your brand’s reputation early enough in the development cycle before product release.
2. Improved Lead Generation and Conversion Rates
A user-friendly website with clear calls to action will convert more visitors into leads and paying customers. QA testing can help ensure all functional buttons work as expected.
3. Enhanced Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty
A seamless user experience will foster customer satisfaction and loyalty. It’ll also increase customer retention and organic positive word-of-mouth marketing.
4. Reduced Development and Maintenance Costs
Website QA helps identify bugs early enough in the software development lifecycle.
This in turn minimizes the need for costly post-release fixes and maintenance which is about 15 times more than fixing them during the testing phase.
5. Protection against Cyberattacks
Ensuring your SaaS product passes all security checks before release can help uncover and fix vulnerabilities and protect your users and platform from potential threats.
Protection against cyberattacks is also a critical factor that helps your users build trust in your services.
Website QA Testing Process
Integrating QA testing into your website is easy. Follow these steps:
1. Define your testing scope
Before testing, it’s crucial to define what areas of your website need testing. It could be specific features or the entire website.
Highlight all the elements and functionalities that require testing. And where you need to improve the existing QA process, analyze your current testing process, and identify areas for automation.
2. Formulate a test plan
A test plan highlights the testing approach, including details like how, when, and what to do, and the person responsible for the testing.
This helps organize the whole testing process and ensures there’s no stone left unchecked.
3. Select the appropriate website QA testing tool
Evaluate various website QA testing tools and choose the one that best suits your needs.
Ensure you consider other factors such as cost, coverage, speed, and brand reputation before making a choice.
4. Provide relevant training data for your QA testing tool
Provide the chosen QA testing tool with high-quality training data, including test cases, bug reports, and user behavior data. The more the data, the better the results.
5. Run the tests
Integrate the QA testing tool with your existing development and testing workflows for maximum productivity and efficiency.
6. Conduct user acceptance testing
Finally, ensure you conduct user acceptance testing after every other testing to ensure software quality before product release.
This involves hands-on testing for subjective reviews and to ensure customer satisfaction.
Both alpha and beta user acceptance testing are crucial in this stage.
Best Practices for Website QA Testing
Common best practices include:
- Develop a comprehensive testing strategy that best suits your website QA process
- Continuously monitor and improve testing processes for optimal results.
- Test for functionality, performance, security, usability, and compatibility
- Use testing tools and frameworks to improve efficiency
- Use a combination of manual and automated testing
- Check for mobile optimization
- Always perform Alpha and Beta user acceptance testing
- Continuously train and upskill your quality engineers
Popular Tools for Automated Website Testing
There are several automated QA website testing tools, each with its strengths and functionalities.
Here are a few examples:
1. QA.tech
QA.tech is an AI-powered testing platform that leverages machine learning to discover, plan, execute, and evaluate tests as well as fix potential issues.
It has a user-friendly and intuitive interface that makes it easy for testers of all skill levels to create and manage automated tests.
2. Selenium
Selenium is a popular open-source framework for automating web browser interactions. Although it requires more technical expertise to set up, Selenium offers a high degree of control over automation scripts.
3. Cypress.io
Cypress.io is a user-friendly and intuitive test automation tool. It’s clear documentation and intuitive API makes it easy to write test scripts quickly and effectively.
However, its functionalities are limited to desktop web applications with no support for mobile app testing.
On a Final Note
Continuous QA testing helps enhance user retention and satisfaction, improve the brand’s integrity, and ultimately contribute to its success. This investment pays off in the long run by improving user experience, reducing costs, and building customer trust.
Are you looking for a comprehensive solution for your website QA testing needs?
If yes, consider QA.tech, a comprehensive AI testing tool for web applications. Our autonomous tool can help you accomplish your testing goals without breaking the bank. Get started today!
