Launching a new ecommerce website is an exciting and rewarding experience, but it also requires a lot of preparation and testing.
You don’t want to risk losing customers, revenue, or reputation because of errors, bugs, or poor performance on your web pages.
That’s why you need to test your ecommerce web pages before launching them to the public.
In this blog post, we’ll show you how to test your ecommerce web pages for functionality, usability, design, speed, and security.
We’ll also share some best practices and tools for web development ecommerce that will help you optimize your website and deliver a great user experience.
Performance Test
A performance test is a test that measures how fast and reliable your web page is. Performance is crucial for ecommerce websites, as it affects not only user satisfaction, but also SEO rankings and conversion rates.
Therefore, you should aim to optimize your web page speed and performance as much as possible. Here are some ways to do that:
- Use a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to analyze your web page speed and performance. These tools will give you a score and a list of recommendations on how to improve your page speed.
- Compress your images and videos to reduce their file size and loading time. You can use tools like TinyPNG or HandBrake to do that.
- Minify your HTML, CSS and JavaScript code to remove any unnecessary spaces, comments or characters. You can use tools like HTMLMinifier or Minify to do that.
- Use a content delivery network (CDN) to deliver your web page content faster and more efficiently to users around the world. A CDN is a network of servers that caches and distributes your web page content based on the user’s location. You can use services like Cloudflare or Amazon CloudFront to set up a CDN for your website.
- Enable browser caching to store some of your web page resources on the user’s browser, so that they don’t have to be downloaded again on subsequent visits.
Usability Test
A usability test is a test that measures how easy and intuitive your web page is for users. Usability is essential for ecommerce websites, as it affects user satisfaction, engagement and loyalty.
According to Nielsen Norman Group, usability is defined by five quality components:
- Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks on the first visit?
- Efficiency: How quickly can users perform tasks once they are familiar with the design?
- Memorability: How easily can users re-establish proficiency when they return after a period of not using the site?
- Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are they, and how easily can they recover from them?
- Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the site?
Therefore, you should aim to optimize your web page usability as much as possible. Here are some ways to do that:
- Use a tool like UserTesting or TryMyUI to conduct usability tests with real users. These tools will allow you to recruit users from your target audience, assign them tasks to perform on your web page, and collect feedback on their experience.
- Follow the web design best practices for ecommerce websites, such as using clear and consistent navigation, providing helpful filters and search features, displaying high-quality product images and videos, providing detailed product descriptions and reviews, offering multiple payment and shipping options, etc.
- Use a tool like Hotjar or Crazy Egg to analyze user behavior on your web page. These tools will provide you with heatmaps, scroll maps, click maps and recordings of user sessions, which will help you understand how users interact with your web page elements and identify any potential usability issues.
- Use a tool like Google Analytics or Mixpanel to measure key usability metrics on your web page, such as bounce rate, time on page, pages per session, etc. These metrics will help you evaluate how well your web page engages and retains users.
Conversion Test
A conversion test is a test that measures how effective your web page is at persuading users to take a desired action, such as adding a product to the cart, completing a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, etc.
Conversion is the ultimate goal of ecommerce websites, as it directly affects revenue and profitability.
Here are some ways to do that:
- Use a tool like Google Optimize or Optimizely to conduct conversion tests with different versions of your web page. These tools will allow you to create and compare variations of your web page elements, such as headlines, images, colors, buttons, etc., and see which ones perform better in terms of conversions.
- Follow the conversion rate optimization (CRO) best practices for ecommerce websites, such as using clear and compelling value propositions, creating a sense of urgency and scarcity, providing social proof and trust signals, reducing friction and distractions, offering incentives and guarantees, etc.
- Use a tool like Google Tag Manager or Segment to track and measure conversions on your web page. These tools will allow you to set up and manage conversion goals and events, such as clicks, form submissions, purchases, etc., and see how they relate to your web page performance.
- Use a tool like Google Data Studio or Tableau to visualize and analyze your conversion data. These tools will allow you to create and share interactive dashboards and reports that will help you understand your conversion trends, patterns and insights.
