Testing Your Website Prior to Launch

23 May Testing Your Website Prior to Launch

At our Long Island web design company, we build a number of industry-specific websites for our clients habitually.  And, while the design, color, coding, typography, and much more will vary cross client, ensuring seamless website design functioning will always remain the same.  Prior to making any site live, it’s critical to test a site and ensure immaculate functioning on a number of different levels.  Everything from user experience, navigation, proper linking, functionality, and the like are paramount to the overall success of the company.

At the end of the day, this website is someone’s business, their bread and butter, and their livelihood.  Everything from social media links, responsive design, and basic user navigation should be designed with the potential customer’s best interest in mind.

Before launching any website, the front end, back end, and everything in between should be checked and scrupulously; and, then checked again.  There are a few things that you should focus on when ensuring that a website functions flawlessly:

Implement measurement tools to test functionality of your web design

Design and aesthetics are obviously important features to a brand image.  However, a website that looks pretty, but doesn’t function properly, is virtually useless.  Customers and business owners rely on website functioning to ensure customer satisfaction, ease of navigation, and the like.  A beneficial thing to do is to actually measure a website’s performance, in regard to individual visits, the amount of time that each person spends on each page, and things of that nature.  These hard facts can be acquired by measurement tools that are installed into the website.  It is imperative that these systems get installed properly, so that the resulting information is accurate for the business owner.

Test the user experience

One of the best ways to ensure that a customer’s user experience is seamless is to test the accuracy and functioning of all site forms.  Serving as one of the most integral instruments in lead acquisition, the forms on any given website have the power to strongly influence the customers of a business.  There are a number of criteria that might be utilized in assessing the form’s functionality.  Whether it’s the simplicity of the form, how relevant it is to the page it’s published on, if it acquires all necessary information, and other critical elements, all forms on a website should be easy to use and elicit the proper outcome.

Test your website links and URLs

Another critical element to test on a website prior to launch are all the links on the site.  If you plan on redirecting your visitors to a new page on your website, you want to make sure that each link leads the individual to the desired destination.  Of course, you want site visitors to end up in their intended location because they simply want to view that page of your site.  But, additionally, you want your site to adequately link to the proper URLs for the purpose of Search Engine optimization (SEO).  If you don’t, your site visitors will be ticked off and Google might even go as far as to punish you.

Bottom line, site functionality is a big deal both in regard to ease of navigation and marketing.  Think of a website as a place of residence.  When you have visitors over for a party, you want to ensure that their time spent is as enjoyable and stress-free as possible.  So, before they come, you clean your home, tidy up, and make sure that everything is running properly.  The same mentality should be put in place regarding a website.  You certainly wouldn’t want people leaving your website saying, “I’m never going back there again!”