As mobile devices are being used increasingly, an intuitive and properly functional mobile website is essential for businesses. To optimize the mobile web experience for their customers, organizations must prioritize conducting thorough testing of their mobile sites. This brings forward the central function of mobile site testers for detecting and handling bugs and problems on the mobile website.
Mobile website testing helps to test the web application or website across multiple browsers, devices, and operating systems to check its compatibility, functionality, and user-friendliness. A mobile-optimized website is necessary for a good user experience and high engagement, resulting in lower bounce rates. Organizations must stay updated with rapidly developing technology as mobile website usage grows continuously.
This article will discuss evaluating mobile site testers and the criteria businesses should consider for efficient mobile web testing.
Importance of a Mobile-friendly Website
The development of smartphones has fueled the convenience for users to imitate actions, such as shopping, media consumption, payments, and others, that were earlier accomplished on a laptop or desktop. The desktop sites are also accessible on Android mobile. Adobe Retail Shopping Insights says that in the 2022 holiday season, mobile website revenue was $ 124 billion. Mobile payment applications have catalyzed online shopping.
What is Mobile Website Testing?
Mobile website testing evaluates a website on a mobile device to decide if it is accessible and functional. This incorporates checking for inconsistencies, errors, and potential issues with page design, user interactions, navigation, and overall functionality.
Various devices are utilized for mobile website testing, including laptops, tablets, smartphones, and even feature phones. Furthermore, the testing can also be executed on specific web browsers or operating systems.
A few features of mobile website testing are:
Improve User Experience: To deal with interface-affecting user experience, mobile site developers need to perform thorough website testing on different devices, operating systems, and networks. Therefore, users will be offered a better experience, leading to more users visiting the website.
Compatibility: Mobile devices have different screen widths and resolutions, and this is specific to desktops, which may affect how a website looks. Failure to optimize for mobile can lead to poor presentation on smaller screens, resulting in a bad user experience. Mobile website testing helps design websites that can fit different sizes of screens and resolutions to reach a consistent and happy user experience.
Better security: Conducting mobile website testing can be crucial in identifying security vulnerabilities that risk user data. Addressing these weaknesses helps enhance the website’s security, facilitating consumer trust in protecting their data.
Techniques For Mobile Website Testing
There are various mobile website compatibility testing techniques in the market. Each possesses its own unique set of benefits and features that can make the testing process more leisurely.
Below are the best mobile website testing techniques to ensure the website is functioning as expected on mobile devices:
Desktop Browsers
Desktop browsers play an essential role in mobile website testing. They provide a consistent user experience and can help to pinpoint potential issues. When selecting a browser, assessing the platform and the available features is necessary.
Emulators and Simulators
Emulators and simulators are software tools designed to facilitate website testing across various mobile platforms like Android, iPhone, and iPad. Emulators enable users to assess the website’s performance in a mobile environment, while simulators provide a controlled desktop setting for testing. These tools ensure optimal website appearance and functionality across diverse devices.
Cross Browser Testing
Conducting cross-browser testing of your website across various browsers is essential to verify its optimal functionality on all devices, encompassing mobile phones and tablets. This practice mitigates potential issues that could result in customer loss or harm brand reputation.
Benefits of Mobile Website Testing
Mobile website testing endows development teams with numerous benefits, such as:
- Authorizes developers to assess how a website renders on mobile browsers installed on operating systems like iOS and Android. This assists in guaranteeing that there are no compatibility problems for the target device-browser-OS combination.
- Facilitates teams in testing and optimizing their websites across various mobile browsers, including Samsung Internet, Chrome, Safari, and others.
- Making websites optimized for mobile devices enhances their usability. Besides, it helps attain higher rankings on search engines as Google deems mobile-friendliness a ranking factor, resulting in better visibility of web pages.
Mobile website testing enhances website performance and responsiveness on mobile platforms. Ensuring compatibility across various mobile devices optimizes user experiences and facilitates quicker loading times.
Best Mobile Website Testing Tools
Having the suited mobile website testing tools in the arsenal is essential for assuring the performance and quality of Android and iOS mobile applications. These tools are excellent assets for adequately managing and implementing mobile website testing strategies. The tools are proven to streamline operations and deliver outcomes, whether you are an individual, developer, or tester trying to improve your mobile website testing endeavors.
Here are a few popular mobile website testing tools:
LambdaTest
LambdaTest is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform that facilitates testers to test mobile websites on emulators, simulators, and real devices. It allows testers to execute tests across multiple devices utilizing LambdaTest online real device cloud.
LambdaTest can conduct manual website testing and website test automation for native applications across over 3000 Android and iOS devices. This feature enables substituting costly testing methods with a user-friendly cloud-based mobile testing platform that guarantees enhanced reliability and compatibility with real device testing. LambdaTest provides real devices cloud, and virtual devices for mobile website testing.
The platform facilitates collaboration among team members by providing features for sharing test sessions, collaborating on debugging efforts, and communicating effectively during the testing process. This promotes teamwork and accelerates issue resolution.
LambdaTest generates detailed reports and insights, offering visibility into the test results and performance metrics. This information is valuable for assessing the quality of the application, identifying potential issues, and making data-driven decisions.
Robotium
Robotium is a highly regarded open-source tool for mobile website testing. It provides developers with comprehensive resources and methodologies for efficiently testing their applications. The tool is specifically engineered to automate the testing procedures, alleviating the need for manual verification of every aspect of an application.
Robotium enables developers to create test cases for various testing scenarios. These scenarios encompass verifying the proper functionality of specific features within the application, assessing the app’s behavior under diverse conditions, and evaluating compliance with designated acceptance criteria. Besides, Robotium can handle numerous activities in an Android application, like different screens or sections of a website.
Espresso
Espresso is a widely recognized Android automation testing framework developed by Google, and it is known for its excellent performance and efficiency. This framework allows users to easily create simple tests without having to worry about the complexities of the application’s infrastructure.
Espresso facilitates faster feedback on code modifications, assisting in swifter debugging and issue resolution. The framework eliminates needing a separate server, operates alongside the app, and furnishes instant test results. The synchronized implementation and element confirmation mechanism of Espresso guarantees stable test cycles and controls failures due to undetected objects.
Robot Framework
The Robot Framework is an open-source test automation framework designed to develop acceptance tests. It allows users to choose several test cases and create channels, such as behavior-driven, keyword-driven, and data-driven strategies. This variety in test case styles enhances comprehension and makes the framework particularly user-friendly. Test cases are structured in a tabular format using a keyword approach, significantly improving readability and ensuring clear communication of test scenarios.
Robot framework furnishes robust support for integrating external tools and libraries, authorizing seamless automation. Moreover, the installation procedure is user-friendly, facilitating the creation and execution of test cases and making it easily navigable for individuals new to testing, even those with limited testing expertise.
XCUITest
In 2015, Apple unveiled XCUITest, an advanced mobile website testing tool tailored to automate UI tests on iOS devices. Leveraging XCTest, Apple’s integrated test framework for Xcode, XCUITest delivers a streamlined and effective testing solution. This tool enables developers to script automated UI tests using Swift or Objective-C, the primary programming languages for native iOS and macOS app development.
Selendroid
Selendroid is an open-source test automation framework developed to operate through the UI of Android hybrid, native, and mobile website applications. It uses the underlying Android instrumentation framework to attain this functionality. Besides, the tests are scripted using the Selenium 2 client API, also known as the Selenium WebDriver. This integration permits Selendroid to use and build upon the existing Selenium effectively.
Selendroid integrates seamlessly with the JSON wire protocol and is compatible with Selenium 3. This makes Selendroid a reliable choice for automation. It is among the favorite mobile website testing tools because the built-in website view application Android driver in Selendroid permits efficient testing of mobile web applications. Selendroid ensures consistency and ease of use.
Xamarin.UITest
Xamarin.UITest is a comprehensive C# testing framework integrated with NUnit, designed for conducting UI Acceptance Tests across iOS and Android applications. This versatile framework seamlessly interfaces with Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android applications, in addition to native iOS and Android projects.
Developers can effectively automate the execution of NUnit tests on Android and iOS devices by utilizing Xamarin.UITest. These tests replicate user interactions with the application’s user interface, encompassing activities such as text input, button pressing, and gestures like swiping. Xamarin.UITest facilitates cross-platform testing by using similar web pages across platforms.
Its REPL tool permits real-time interaction and user interface element exploration. The Page Object Pattern in Xamarin.UITest ensures maintainable, scalable, and readable tests. Native Xamarin Test Cloud support authorizes running tests on various devices in the cloud.
Appium
Appium is a versatile open-source automation testing tool designed for testing Android and iOS applications. It is particularly effective for testing web and mobile applications, including hybrid apps. Appium is instrumental in conducting automated functional testing, enhancing applications’ overall performance and functionality.
Besides, Appium supports eEnd-to-end testing in numerous programming languages, such as C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, and Node. It supports testing on Android and iOS devices utilizing the same API. Appium integrates seamlessly with Jenkins and other popular CI/CD tools. The record and playback feature permits testers to speed up the testing procedure and produce test scripts in various programming languages.
Conclusion
Selecting the appropriate mobile website testing tool is essential for effectively testing a mobile website. It is necessary to assess the tester’s features, usability, and compatibility with various devices and operating systems to facilitate a seamless and productive mobile web testing procedure. Furthermore, investing in a dependable and effective mobile website testing tool can save time and resources and minimize potential future challenges.