In the past decade, the number of mobile phones has increased exponentially. Thousands of mobile companies launch numerous types of mobile devices on a monthly and yearly basis. The increase in mobile devices simultaneously heightens the demand for mobile and web applications. Also, the software development process is incomplete without testing websites on mobile devices. As in the current scenarios, many people prefer to open the websites on their mobile device rather than opening a laptop or computer system due to ease of use. The website organization must make their website compatible with numerous devices, reliable, and ensure the features and functionality of their website.
Over the globe, there are thousands of mobile device companies and for every company, there are thousands of devices. So when a website is developed, it is obvious for the development and testing team to have concerns about testing the site on mobile. There are many tools and technologies available to test sites on mobile devices but without a proper strategy, the testing result may not be according to the expectation. In this article, you will see the various aspects of site testing on mobile devices and then you will see what are the advanced strategies for testing sites on mobile devices.
What is Mobile Website Testing?
Mobile website testing is defined as the process in which the QA and testing team ensures the website’s compatibility, functionality, and usability for various types of mobile devices. It makes sure that the website you have developed will work without any malfunctioning with all the targeted mobile devices or not. These days, the users are using both desktop or computers and mobile devices to access the websites. So, the software application developers need to make their website accessible for most of the devices that are being used by users across the globe.
You can opt for cloud-based site testing as it has many advantages. When you perform testing on cloud premises, you can execute tests with much scalability, reliability, etc. Also, you can restrict the use of testing resources on the cloud according to your needs. It saves a lot of extra resource costs. All these benefits reflect that you should always prefer cloud-based site testing on mobile devices.
Using a real device cloud like LambdaTest is crucial for effective software testing. These clouds consist of physical devices hosted on servers, offering users the resources needed for thorough application testing.
LambdaTest is an AI-driven platform that orchestrates and executes both manual and automated tests at scale. It supports real-time and automated testing across over 3,000 environments and real mobile devices.
The platform provides access to real mobile devices, creating a realistic environment for testing mobile applications. This includes testing across different devices, operating systems, and screen sizes, addressing the complexities of mobile app development.
Testing on real devices lets you explore various real-world scenarios, such as:
- Device capabilities
- Bandwidth
- GPS functionality
- Battery consumption
- Camera performance
- Call and SMS notifications
- Network issues
Mobile site testing objective and types
The main objective of mobile site testing is to find and resolve any kind of error or bugs that may affect the performance of the website and user experience. Any website that is not developed to perform on various types of mobile devices does not provide a good user experience and also it leads to a degradation in the user base because the users will try to shift to other websites. And it will be a loss to the software application organization. There are many types of website testing that should be taken into account while performing website testing and also it is considered a good strategy to use such testing. These are as follows:
- Functional Testing: Functional testing is used to ensure that all the features and functionalities of the website are working and compatible with different mobile devices. In it, you examine the website buttons, forms, and other features.
- Performance Testing: Performance testing is defined as the test of measuring a software testing process based on its speed, responsiveness, network stability, etc. The organization performs performance testing to check the bottlenecks of the performance.
- Security Testing: Security testing is done to verify safety and security measures, such as identifying potential threats, vulnerabilities, weaknesses, unidentified access, etc. Any activity that may lead to security compromises must be identified and fixed in the security testing of a web app.
- Unit Testing: Unit testing is the testing in which you break the desired outcome into separate units. Doing so allows you to predict any minor issues as you check if the small number of inputs are working properly output or not. As the name suggests, unit testing is done to precisely perform smaller tests and then merge them to get a proper testing result.
Need to Perform Mobile Site Testing
Till now, you have seen what mobile site testing is, now let us see why you need to perform mobile site testing.
- Better User Experience: According to a recent report by HubSpot, almost 85% of users do not visit the website again if they experience a bad user experience. They shift to some alternative websites. So, it is a must to provide a better user experience by performing mobile site testing. You need to explore the parameters that need to be tested to provide a better user experience such as many devices, operating systems, and networks.
- Improve Search Ranking and Speed: The most popular search engine Google prioritizes mobile-friendly websites in search rankings. It results in higher website visibility and increased traffic. To make your website better ranking for mobile devices, it is a must to perform mobile site testing.
- Better Compatibility: Every mobile device has its own specifications such as screen size, resolution, etc. So, when the website is developed, it may be possible that it will not displayed the same on every device. Also, it may be possible that all the features and functionality will not work the same way on every device. So, mobile website testing helps to ensure that a website adapts according to the device on which it is opened and provides better compatibility.
- Better Security and Performance: Performing mobile site testing helps to identify any kind of security drawbacks and also you can fix them to make your software application more secure. Also, you can analyze various performance factors such as poor load time, site responsiveness, etc. So, it is important to perform mobile site testing.
Top Advanced Strategies for Testing Sites on Mobile Devices
Proper planning and strategy are required to make your automation testing successful with much efficiency. Let us see some of the best and most advanced strategies for testing sites on mobile devices.
Emulators and Simulators for Testing
Using emulators and simulators is a great and effective strategy for testing sites on mobile devices. These help the developers and QA team to identify and rectify any kind of UI and UX errors and bugs in the software applications. Emulators and simulators are still not the best options for mobile site testing. This is due to the reason that emulators and simulators are mostly used to perform testing on native applications, having other options like mobile emulators for browser testing is still helpful. There are still many advantages of using emulators for mobile site testing.
One of them is cost-effectiveness. It is cost-effective because when you use simulators for automation testing, you do not need any kind of physical infrastructure. So, they are the best strategy for mobile app testing with respect to cost-effectiveness. Apart from this, emulators and simulators also provide accessibility benefits. It allows developers to test mobile websites on various screen sizes, resolutions, and operating systems. Another benefit of using emulators is that you can easily debug any error or bugs. It allows you to detect and rectify the bugs at the early stage of mobile site testing.
Using Test Automation Tools
Performing mobile site testing is a very important stage in the whole development process. And there are lots of steps and actions required to complete this process with efficiency and accuracy. So, using automation tools for mobile site testing is a very useful strategy that must be followed by the testing and QA team. Because manually doing such a huge number of crucial testing steps will lead to less efficient and less accurate testing output. You need to consider some parameters to choose the automation tool for your mobile site testing. The first one is the mobile site testing goals. While deciding goals, you need to identify the testing goals by deciding your target audience and their needs. Then, you need to describe the website’s purpose and user journey. It will help you prioritize mobile devices, OS browsers, and test cases requiring bug-free website development.
Mobile Site Testing on Real Cloud Devices
Performing mobile site testing on real devices is considered one of the great and advanced strategies that must be followed. Performing mobile site testing on a real device cloud helps you to get a clear view of how your website is going to look over the mobiles and how the website will act. There are many helpful advantages that you get if you test mobile sites on real devices. One of them is testing stability. It is a very basic and important factor for any website. As internet access through mobile data is rising steadily, testing your website on different network conditions should be part of your testing process.
Also, you get to test your mobile site on mobile using various real-world scenarios. You can test mobile sites against situations such as fluctuating illumination, network conditions, and physical barriers, resulting in a more accurate portrayal of the user experience. Real devices also help you to test the mobile site on mobile devices using various configurations of GPS, camera, touch screen, etc which ensures the website functionality to a great extent.
Conclusion
As we know, the demand for versatile websites is always in demand. A large number of businesses are dependent on websites for their promotions, sales, and many business tasks. Users use their mobile phones to open the website and visit the website to get their work done easily. So the website company must be capable enough to make a website that is compatible with a huge number of mobile devices. The main objective of mobile site testing is to find and resolve any kind of error or bugs that may affect the performance of the website and user experience.
You can do various testing such as functional testing, regression testing, UI/UX testing, etc to make your site compatible with multiple mobile devices. But you need to execute the testing in a strategic manner to get the best testing output. The various advanced strategies for testing sites on mobile devices are using emulators and simulators, making proper testing planning, using real cloud devices, etc.
