Every business needs a website. It sure beats the old Yellow Page ads. You get a full-color representation of your business, the people who work for it, your values, who you serve, etc. You even get to list any open jobs and content that bolsters both your trust and your SEO. You can update it any time you’d like!
But you’re probably guilty of a few omissions about managing your website – even tech companies. If you developed your website or commissioned someone else to do so, how much testing did you really undertake to ensure that the content, how it renders, and the technology that operates it securely are beyond “kinda adequate”?
Here are a few checks you can run on your site by doing some manual testing and peeking at its code:
Copyright on your footer – this is a code check. Is that hard coded to the year in which the site was developed and will henceforth display that date until you manually change it?
How’s the site render on laptop, tablet, mobile. What variances are there?
What pages are there on the site? Are they all linked and appearing as you expect?
If you’ve got a WordPress site, well, that’s a whole separate blog post, but you can regularly ensure or pay someone – likely your designer – to ensure that its underlying components are at their latest versions. Or, of course, you can do that yourself. That’s not really testing, though. It’s housekeeping.
Considering these wonderful tests you can do yourself, what are some pitfalls of testing your own site?
First, you’re familiar with it – after all, you built the requirements and maybe even the site itself. Ever heard the phrase “everyone needs an editor?” That’s because we fill in the gaps we know with what’s supposed to be there. In other words, we can miss vital things because we “see” them even when they’re not available to be seen. An outsider’s review helps.
If you’re a tech company who employs software developers and offhandedly said to them, “hey, test our website” or maybe even a “test your own code” – this is a practice you likely want to reconsider. Unless your devs enjoy being labeled as SDETs – Software Developers in Test – testing to them is work akin to sweeping a clean floor. “My code’s good; are we done yet?” Ask me how I know.
If you’re not a software development shop but are running a web application for your business, you’ll probably also want some automated, regular testing.
And – this goes for companies of all sizes, in all industries, and if I could make this blink I would: a security test or 6 is vital. Check your inputs, outputs, web servers, platforms…and who’s got time for that!
To wrap this all up without blinking, somebody’s got to test. Tests need to be as comprehensive as the website or web application itself. If you don’t have time and inclination, find a partner who’ll beat it up, er, put it through the paces and tell you where to bolster how it runs.