Whenever you think of a product, you think it’s of good quality, am I right? You wouldn’t want faulty shoes, a slow phone, or an apartment that leaks.
The same is the case with websites. Everyone wants a bug-free, fast, and responsive website on all devices. It doesn’t reach that level quickly. It undergoes thorough quality assurance checks.
Quality assurance is the process of finding loopholes, faults, and bugs in a web product and making sure it is what the clients want. It plays a very crucial role in gaining customer trust, loyalty, and an overall ROI.
However, most people confuse “quality assurance” with “testing.” Quality assurance is a strategy used by competent web development firms to ensure that the expectation-performance gap is as small as possible. However, testing is checking the quality of the codes and technical aspects of the web product.
Why Is Quality Assurance Important For WordPress Web Development Companies?
WordPress web development companies ensures quality assurance. Without quality assurance, your product won’t look good, perform well, and might stop working from time to time due to bugs and poor coding quality. That increases the cost of your website and business.
- A quality-assured web product would most likely be noticed due to improved performance and responsiveness.
- Your website will perform at its best and (mostly) give you a better ROI, saving you a lot of money.
- A good-quality website creates a good brand image for your customers, and they keep returning.
- A website that doesn’t undergo quality assurance becomes a victim of bugs. Those bugs are responsible for data loss, breaches of confidentiality, or even getting hacked by bad guys on the internet.
Types of Quality assurance testing
There are numerous types of quality assurance testing available to WordPress developers. These tests help them create the best versions of websites and applications that are scalable, responsive, fast, and secure. These tests include
Unit testing: It tests the methods, functions, and procedures of the software.
Integration testing: It verifies the individual modules and services in the website software to work well and in harmony.
End-to-end testing: It verifies the software is working throughout the user flow, i.e., from the beginning to the end.
Acceptance testing: It comes after the software creation is tested by the end users under close observation.
Regression testing: It ensures the code addition does not disturb the software features that are already approved and tested.
Functional testing: It focuses on the changes to the codes in the current development stages.
Performance testing: It measures software speed, scalability, and stability under known and unknown circumstances.
What WordPress elements need quality assurance testing?
Like any other website platform, WordPress has myriad elements that need to be tested before the project is presented to the client or its end users. That is why the teams of developers in any expert web development agency prioritize quality assurance in their development processes.
Below are some factors and elements that must be tested during the website development and quality assurance stages.
- Testing CTA/ Contact forms/checkouts
- Interactive elements
- Copies
- SEO plugin
- Every link in the WordPress website
- Images
- Coding compliances
- Accessibility issues
- Browser and Device compatibility
- Speed
- Stress
- Security
- Google Analytics
- Site index verification
- Third-party integrations
Steps of WordPress Quality assurance
If you want your website to look flawless, work smoothly, protect your privacy, earn you hard cash, and most importantly, give the best user experience and returns, it is crucial to get yourself a solid quality assurance from an innovative web development agency that has genius experts. They review your site from all angles and make it operate perfectly.
Do not avoid the problem or the bugs when you face them. Timely realizing the problem gives you the edge to hire experts from web development agencies.
Analyze
Experts analyze your website and detect bugs and issues that need to be resolved. They scrutinize your functional and non-functional requirements. They must be provided with a clear and detailed timeline for quality assurance checks that is consistent, thorough, and realistic. In this way, they can run quality assurance without any discrepancies.
Plan
All the details you provide to the quality assurance professionals help them plan the quality assurance sessions. The design of a testing strategy, related costs, and deadlines They define the outline, types, testing levels, tools, and methods they use to track bugs, and they divide responsibilities accordingly.
Design Tests
All of the functionalities that need to be tested are assessed by the quality assurance team. They design and prepare a checklist of conditions, data, and steps that are needed to validate the functionalities.
They start with exploratory testing so that they become familiar with the WordPress platform. This will enable them to design test cases. They prepare test environments that are compatible with the hardware, software, configurations, etc.
Carry out Tests and Defect Detection
The QA experts perform unit testing as well as API and UI testing. They run manual testing with test cases. The bugs are detected, and the defects are tracked. QA team then prepares a test summary report using automated testing frameworks like Appium and Cypres, etc.
Regression tests
The functions and features are tested again once the bugs are detached and removed from the WordPress website The QA team runs regression tests to verify that the tests have not affected the website’s functions.
Run release tests
After finishing the tests, QA experts release a list of quality checks like implemented features, bug fixes, recurrence issues, and limitations. Great agencies’ QA teams also provide a list of changes in the functionalities due to the quality assurance implementations.
For final touches, QA teams run smoke tests to ensure website stability and then modify the test suites, which are followed by report generation after final submission.
Quality Assurance Mistakes To Avoid
Relying on WYSIWYG only
WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) is software that enables the users to see and edit the content as they would like it to appear. WordPress is an interaction medium between you and your users, but WYSIWYG doesn’t always work, especially for complex and heavy websites.
That is why competent developers get their hands dirty by looking at the website’s backend and changing and improving the codes, negating the acronym by saying, “What you see is not what you get.”
Starting too late
When it comes to website quality assurance, most website owners are reactive rather than proactive, which is highly detrimental to their business. The later you receive quality assurance, the more your company will have to pay.
Get a good web development agency to run quality assurance checks end-to-end on your WordPress website to avoid regrets and losses.
Postponing the release
It seems like it negates the previous statement, but if you search for perfection, it is never going to come. When your website looks good to go, you must proceed to release it and do your business.
But, as you find problems and bugs in your website, you must proceed to apply for a good web design and development company to run quality assurance processes over your website to prevent bugs, viruses, and, of course, losses.
Takeaways
- Not a single website is bug-free. Deal with it as soon as you can.
- You must ensure the highest quality of your website by running frequent quality assurance checks and by hiring a good and competitive web development agency for your WordPress website.
- You need quality assurance because
- You want a good quality website
- Not investing in a good quality assurance team will cost you more than you can expect.
- You cannot afford to have bugs ruin your operations and business.
- Almost every element of your website needs Quality assurance, be that any element in the frontend, backend, codes, integrations or images, etc.
- Quality assurance tests involve analyzing, planning, designing, executing, regression testing, and release testing. They cover all aspects of making a website work flawlessly.
- You must avoid relying on the “WYSIWYG” acronym and let the experts handle the backend dirty work as soon as possible.
- You should not strive for perfection but also not avoid bugs and problems when you face them.
