What Do I Have to Test Before my Website Goes Online?

Make sure to check all the links available on your website: They have to be visible, stand out, and have a hover action (this gives feedback to the user about what he is doing). The second part is the testing of the final destinations of all the links on your website in order to avoid dead links. All links have to lead to a real existing page that fits the purpose of the link.

The next step would be to check all call-to-action elements on your website. These include:

- Buttons
- Plugins
- Forms

You have to make sure that all the buttons lead to the action that they are supposed to (menu buttons, footer, ordering, notifcations, etc.). Checking your forms involves trying to send both valid and invalid information through them. This way, you can check the validation of the form, whether it gives error or success messages, file previews, and any other feedback that users have to see while completing your forms. Also, to be sure that a form can be submitted successfully, do not forget to check the database or email address that has to receive the information filled in on the form.

For webshops it is important to check whether all ordering processes are working. So, try to order a couple of things from your website, and try out various delivery and payment options. In this, make sure to check your administration dashboard to see if the orders reach you as owner of the website so you won't receive any complaints in this department.

Cookies are small data packages that are used by websites to save information about your navigation status on your harddisk. They consist of small-sized files, composed of numbers and characters. Each time that you go back to the same website, it will load the cookies stored on your device. This can be considered as a core user identification method.

Does your website use cookies? If so, you are obliged by the Cookie Law to inform your visitors about this and ask for an explicit permission from their side to use cookies.

If you want to learn more about cookies, read our article: What are cookies and what are they used for?

If your website captures and processes private information from its users, you are obliged by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to inform your customers about the data that you will collect and what the purpose of it is. It is advisable to let these documents be written by a lawyer with expertise in this field so you can be sure that it is written in accordance with the current law.

Usually the links to the Privacy Policy and Disclaimer are introduced into the footer of the website. If you want to learn more about this, read our article on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Although they are not mandatory, we always advise to connect an Analytics platform to your website. With an Analytics platform, you can measure your sales and conversions, and it get up-to-date information about the users that visited your website, the source they came from, the pages they opened, and how much time they spent on each of them.

You can learn more about analytics here.

Check the content of all your pages. Are all pages filled with the right text and images? Because (lorem ipsum texts do not count). While you're on it, also check your content layout and revise any potential typo's that have gotten in.

Click here to learn more about web text, copywriters, and what type of images are best fit for your website.

Check you website for error pages like the "404 – Page missing" message. By default, these cases will give you a simple PHP / Browser code-error 404, but you can also customize this page to fit your design. In this, you can keep the navigation bar on top, for example, which will allow users to easily navigate back to the page that they came from. In addition, you can add a report button, so your visitors can report the links / pages that are faulty to you, which allows you to get them fixed more quickly.