Quality assurance for your business’s new website
Quality control is paramount prior to the launch of a new business website. While it’s not uncommon for other website companies to prioritise the visual appeal and churn out pretty sites full of hidden functionality issues, which therefore fail to benefit your business in achieving its objectives, we steer clear of providing our clients such a disservice.
Quality control (QC) is paramount prior to the launch of a new business website.
Any potential website functionality issues need to be eradicated or else your site may struggle to convert, losing you revenue and impacting your bottom line. As such every website, regardless of whether it’s complex in design or simple-looking, needs to be styled for multiple devices and tested on each as well.
While it’s not uncommon for other website companies to prioritise the visual appeal and churn out pretty sites full of hidden functionality issues, which therefore fail to benefit your business in achieving its objectives, we steer clear of providing our clients such a disservice.
Our QC process covers the user interface, core functionality, any Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) functionality and final testing prior to setting the site live.
This includes looking for styling glitches across all sorts of devices and browsers (Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera, Microsoft Edge, and Internet Explorer 9, 10 and 11), including checking the home slideshow content and ensuring any featured products appearing on the home page are displaying as expected, as well as:
- Ensuring all pages have titles written with best SEO practices in mind, to keep Google happy.
- Checking for broken links, which can obviously be frustrating for visitors and lead to people exiting your site rather than converting.
- All forms are sending correctly, to ensure leads submitted electronically are received.
- All phone numbers are linked and working correctly when clicked, to make sure customers using mobiles can make contact with a simple tap of their finger.
- The shopping cart has been tested with 50-plus products (if it’s an ecommerce site), to ensure there’s no issues with customers making online purchases.
- Setting up and testing Google Analytics tracking, to ensure all business goals or conversions – whether leads or transactions – are measured to inform any ongoing refinement.
And that’s just the beginning.
User interface (UI) design checks are undertaken in relation to the home page, menus, search results and – in conjunction with additional ERP functionality checks – the quick cart summary, product pages, category pages, cart view, checkout page, order confirmation page and customer account section.
Product page QC, for example, typically involves the following (and additional steps):
- Checking the product name, code and short/long descriptions are present.
- Checking a large image and multiple image slider are displaying correctly.
- Checking the price displays excluding GST (with a label saying so).
- Checking any special members pricing (if relevant) shows correctly when a registered customer logs in.
- Hiding irrelevant labels.
- Ensuring multi-variants are correctly displaying, such as size/colour options.
- Testing price breaks, such as unit pricing.
- Checking the display of any related products.
- Making sure the ‘Add To Cart’ call to action includes a quantity field to enhance user experience for customers wishing to buy multiples of the same product.
For customer accounts, we ensure:
- The account registration process is free of glitches.
- The log-in process is working as it should and redirects to a welcome screen.
- Logged-in customers can see a list of recent purchases for speedy re-ordering.
- Logged-in customers can view and edit their account details.
- The password retrieval functionality works and customers following this process can log in with the temporary password emailed to them.
For custom Ostendo ERP integrations, there is another additional checklist numbering almost two dozen steps.
Finally, go-live QC tasks include:
- Reviewing the website in line with the client’s agreed specification.
- Double-checking all tracking codes are correctly inserted and working properly, to ensure the client has relevant traffic – and conversion – data available from day one.
- Running a Page Speed Insights test to flag any potential issues with page load times that could impact organic search rankings and conversions, then optimising as required.
- Final checks on form submissions, including ensuring it’s being received by the correct person.
- Checking whether any 301 redirects are required from any previous website for the client.
- Removing robots.txt if it’s a WordPress site, to ensure the site can be indexed by Google and other search engines.
- Ensuring all pages only have one H1 tag, with text relevant to the content of that page, for SEO purposes.
- Running a live transaction test and confirming that funds are received by the client.
- Making sure the site works whether or not the user uses www when typing the domain into their browser.
- Testing the SSL certificate has been installed properly.
All the time and effort involved to provide quality assurance combines to ensure your business is primed for online success, rather than your site new tanking.
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