Are you a mobile site tester struggling to verify the performance of your mobile websites across multiple devices? This is the perfect article for you as we will discuss the best practices for testing mobile websites across different devices. During our discussion, we will cover the key aspects like testing methodologies, device selection, performance optimization, and tool selection.
In the current device market, we all can agree that without a proper testing strategy, it becomes almost impossible to verify the performance of applications on this wide range of available devices. A better mobile experience will also help elevate your end-user satisfaction, which will further boost the rankings on search engines and create a positive brand reputation.
Understanding The Importance Of Mobile Site Testing
It is important for the modern testers to go through some of the major parameters that justify the inclusion of mobile site testing in the present market:
- The current customers can access your website from various devices. These choices can also include tablets and IoT devices along with smartphones. So, the testers can safely assume that it will become increasingly important to provide a seamless end-user experience on all these devices.
- If your mobile website provides a poor user experience, it can lead to parameters such as high bounce rates, reduced engagement, and also lower conversion rates, which will massively reduce the overall Return On Investment for your company.
- Search engines like Google prefer websites that have been optimized to run on mobile devices. It means that a mobile optimized website will have a greater chance of ranking within the top search results in Google and drive more traffic.
- Finally, providing a seamless mobile experience to your customers will help to set you apart from your competitors and also create the ideal brand image.
Device Selection of Mobile Site Testing
When it comes to choosing the devices for implementing mobile site testing, the testers are especially confused about whether to choose real devices or rely on only emulation softwares. To help in this process, we have gone through some of the most important parameters that compare both of these options:
- While using real devices, the testers can analyze the impact of various physical parameters on the application’s functioning. This helps to massively improve the accuracy of the test reports and understand the effect of parameters such as user interaction errors, network latencies, or broken displays.
- On the other hand, emulation software are easy to set up and use. They are highly cost-effective and are almost the best option for executing the initial test cases during the testing process. However, they cannot capture or mimic the physical parameters of a device and may not be accurate for the complex testing scenarios.
Prioritizing the Devices
As we already mentioned earlier, there are thousands of mobile devices that are functional in the present market. So, as testers, you must understand that it is almost impractical to give the same priority to all of these devices. To understand the priority of these devices based on your target audience, you must analyze the following parameters:
- First, you must focus on the most popular devices and operating systems at the current time. In this regard, you must understand that this data will continue to change as new devices come into the market.
- Next, you must understand the devices that are being continuously used by the people within your target audience range. This will help you to create a basic idea about the most important devices for executing the test suites.
- Finally, you must create a mix of low, mid, and high-end devices so that you can have access to a massive range of performance scenarios. This is also a very important parameter as almost 60% of the users use mobile devices which are at least 2 years old.
Testing Methodologies
To implement efficient mobile site testing on multiple devices, the application developers must have efficient testing methodologies. This will not only help them to cover all the important testing parameters but will also ensure a constant flow of feedback:
- Functional Testing
The first step is to ensure that all the features of your website are working as expected across multiple mobile devices. You can implement this process by enabling the following parameters during the test execution process:
- The first step involves verifying the performance of the website across multiple popular browsers and mobile devices. The presenters must create different combinations out of these hardware and software configurations to ensure an accurate and dependable test report.
- The next step involves verifying the layout issues, including font sizes, button sizes, and the overall design consistency across different screen sizes and resolutions.
- The final step involves ensuring that the website is easy to navigate and use on multiple mobile devices. During this process, you must understand that the primary mode of interaction on mobile devices is touch-based controls. So, verify all the touch gestures on your website UI.
- Performance Testing
Next, you must focus on the speed, responsiveness, and stability of a website on multiple mobile devices:
- Here, you must first simulate multiple users accessing the website simultaneously to see how it performs under stress, increased load, or unexpected traffic.
- Next, the testers must measure the time taken by the page to load on different devices and network conditions. Various studies suggest that most of the users expect their mobile websites to load within 2 seconds.
- Finally, you must verify that the website layout can adjust itself accordingly to different screen sizes and orientations. This is a very important parameter to ensure that the website is responsive and functional.
- Security Testing
As most modern websites store a lot of sensitive user information, you must guarantee the security of the mobile website infrastructure. You can easily implement this process by including the following parameters during the test cycle:
- Implement data encryption to check if the sensitive data is properly encrypted during transmission across multiple network configurations.
- Next, you must focus on proper authentication to ensure that the login mechanisms are secure and the user data is protected from third-party access.
- Finally, you must perform a thorough vulnerability scanning on the mobile data infrastructure. To implement this process, you can use various automated tools which will help detect potential security issues within the application infrastructure.
Testing Tools for A Mobile Site Tester
To implement mobile site testing, the application developers can use various tools that are easily available in the market. Based on the testing methodology that you are currently focusing on, we have mentioned some of the most important options that can benefit you:
Cross-Browser Testing Tools
The testers can use these tools to verify the performance of the app on a huge range of operating systems, devices, and browser versions. To polish our knowledge of cross-browser testing tools, we are going to use the reference of LambdaTest:
LambdaTest is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform that lets you run manual and automated tests at scale. Using this platform, the developers can run the test suites on more than 3000 different combinations of operating systems, real devices, and browser instances. By executing the test suites on this huge device farm, the app developers can improve the compatibility and functionality of their mobile apps.
LambdaTest can also initiate automated mobile app testing using Appium. Using parallel test execution, LambdaTest can run these automated test suites on more than 50 different testing configurations at the same time.
Performance Testing Tools
To implement performance testing on mobile applications, the application developers can use the following tools within the testing environment:
- Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a great choice to analyze the content of a web page. It also provides suggestions to make it faster and more stable across multiple devices.
- The testers also have the option to use GTMetrix which provides insights on how well the website loads. This tool also offers great recommendations for improving the website loading time.
Responsive Design Testing Tools
Responsive Design Mode is natively present in multiple browsers and can test the responsive design of the mobile website. Some of the great examples include Chrome DevTools for the Chrome browser and Firefox’s Responsive Design Mode for the Mozilla Firefox browser.
Performance Optimization
After executing the test suites, the developers have to focus on the next step, which involves optimizing the website for better performance on mobile devices. To implement this step, the application developers and testers simply have to follow the steps that we have mentioned below:
- The first step involves reducing the CSS, JavaScript, and HTML code files to improve the load times and also the resource optimization for the website infrastructure.
- The testers also have to optimize the images by using proper image formats and compressing the image files to improve the load times for the images as well.
- We also advise the testers to implement lazy loading on their mobile websites. This is an approach which prevents the loading of non-critical resources like images until they are needed for the execution of any specific task.
- It is also important for the testers to implement server-side optimization by distributing their content across multiple servers worldwide to reduce the load on any specific server. The testers can also use Brotli to compress the size of the files sent from the server.
- Finally, it is important to implement client set optimization by minimizing the number of requests. The testers can implement this process by combining the files using inline assets wherever required. We also advise loading JavaScript asynchronously to prevent it from blocking the rendering of the web page.
Continuous Testing And Monitoring
The testers need to integrate tools like Jenkins and Travis CI to run the test cases as part of the deployment process. Using this approach, the testers can not only implement a faster feedback cycle but also conduct the testing and developments simultaneously.
The Bottom Line
Based on all our discussion points that we analyzed in this article, we can safely conclude that testing mobile websites across different devices is an ongoing process which requires careful planning, optimization, and execution. By following the best practices, testing methodologies, and the right tools, the testers can ensure that the website delivers a seamless experience to all users.
The testers can also use continuous monitoring and iteration to stay ahead of the market and also provide a competitive edge in this continuously evolving mobile application development landscape.
Finally, the testers must stay informed about all upcoming tools and technologies to maintain a high-quality mobile web application in the coming years.
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