Did you know people check their mobile phones 58 times daily, spending an average of 3 hours and 15 minutes? Or, the fact that more than 50% of website traffic comes from mobile as of 2024? Internet and mobile use are components of everyday life for billions of people.
In fact, for many, the two now go hand-in-hand.
No wonder it has become essential for developers to prioritize mobile website testing above everything else. To embrace a mobile-first mindset, you must know the types of testing needed, relevant tools and techniques, and the trends shaping the future of website testing.
This guide covers it all and more.
But first, let’s answer a critical question.
What is the Difference Between Mobile and Desktop Website Testing?
Mobile website testing focuses on ensuring your website functions and performs well on mobile devices, accounting for varying screen sizes, touch gestures, and network conditions. It also requires testing across multiple device/OS combinations.
In contrast, desktop website testing typically focuses on performance, functionality, and security on fixed configurations without worrying as much about device variability or touch inputs
In mobile testing, extra attention must be given to performance under constrained conditions (e.g., low bandwidth), battery consumption, and usability on touchscreens. Desktop testing is more straightforward in these aspects.
The Unique Challenges of Mobile Website Testing
When you specifically test a website on mobile, there are a few challenges to be aware of. These include:
- Device fragmentation: Mobile devices come in a wide variety of models, screen sizes, and operating systems, making it essential to ensure your site performs consistently across all combinations
- Network conditions: Mobile users frequently switch between Wi-Fi, LTE, 3G, or even 2G networks. Your site should deliver a smooth experience, regardless of the quality or stability of the connection.
- Screen resolutions: Websites must display properly on everything from small smartphone screens to larger tablets, with dynamic layouts and responsive elements.
- Device updates: Mobile operating systems and device firmware are updated frequently, and your website must remain compatible with the latest versions.
- Security: Mobile environments are more vulnerable to attacks due to public Wi-Fi usage, app permissions, and other factors. Secure data handling is critical. Adopting a strategic and comprehensive approach is essential to ensuring a seamless testing process. Let’s explore the key types of testing for mobile websites.
Types of Mobile Website Testing
1. Security testing
Security is crucial in the mobile landscape.
Test your website for vulnerabilities like insecure data storage or transmission, improper session management, and authentication loopholes. Ensure sensitive data is encrypted and your website complies with security standards like GDPR.
2. Viewport testing
The diversity of mobile screen sizes and resolutions is vast. You must ensure your website looks and works correctly across all devices, from small smartphones to larger tablets.
Test how the layout, images, and text scale on different screens to avoid usability issues like content being cut off or improperly displayed.
3. Usability testing
This tests your website specifically for user-friendliness on mobile devices. End users typically expect a pleasing and intuitive layout, quick response times, and seamless navigation. This will typically involve testing mobile websites with actual groups of end users.
4. Functional testing
Ensure all core site functions work seamlessly, including registration forms, menus, buttons, payment gateways, and authentication processes. Test various real-world scenarios, such as placing an order or signing in with social media accounts.
5. Performance testing
Mobile users often face varying network conditions. Test your website’s speed and responsiveness under different scenarios, including low bandwidth, slow internet connections, and high-traffic situations. Use performance testing tools like Lighthouse or WebPageTest to measure page load times and optimize resource usage.
6. Geolocation testing
Many mobile websites rely on location-based services, so testing GPS features across different regions is crucial. Simulate various locations to ensure your website handles geolocation permissions correctly and delivers relevant content.
7. Cross-browser testing
Mobile web users access websites from different browsers, including Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge. Cross-browser testing ensures your site renders and functions correctly on all major browsers. For optimal results, pay special attention to variations in rendering engines and JavaScript execution across browsers.
8. Touch interaction testing
Evaluate how your site responds to touch-based gestures like taps, swipes, and pinches, as these are central to the mobile experience. Optimizing touch interactions enhances usability.
9. Network condition testing
Mobile users frequently switch between different network types like 2G, 3G, LTE, and Wi-Fi.
Make sure your site performs well under varying conditions, including slow or unstable connections. Test how your site behaves when users go offline or face poor network signals, ensuring content is still accessible or cached appropriately.
10. Battery and resource usage testing
A site that drains a device’s battery or consumes excessive resources can frustrate users and lead to higher bounce rates. Therefore, you’ll want to measure and minimize your site’s resource consumption for a more optimized mobile experience.
4 Methods for Mobile Website Testing
Mobile website testing is complex, but it becomes much more streamlined with the right tools. Some ways to test your mobile website across platforms include:
1. Testing on real devices
No mobile website testing strategy is complete without evaluating how it’s performing on actual devices. Using an absolute device cloud service like TestGrid, you can test for real-world scenarios like fluctuating Internet and low battery and see precisely how your website holds up.
You can also observe how it interacts with device hardware like GPS, touch screens, and cameras. This approach ensures you identify issues specific to user environments before launching the site.
2. Testing on Chrome DevTools
This toolkit allows you to emulate multiple mobile devices and screen resolutions to test how your website behaves on each.
To access DevTools, open Google Chrome on your desktop, press F12, or right-click and select “Inspect.” You can choose from a list of devices, customize the dimensions manually, adjust zooming options, and simulate network conditions or geolocation.
3. Using test automation tools
This is the fastest and most scalable option for mobile website testing, especially if you want to reduce your time to market. Software like Selenium, Appium, or Cypress enables you to automate tests across multiple devices.
By setting clear goals for your testing, choosing the proper framework, and writing suitable test scripts, you can speed up regression testing, especially when running the same test cases repeatedly for different device/OS combinations.
4. Testing on emulators and simulators
Android and iOS simulators, though more geared towards native app testing, are a valuable and cost-effective way to identify UI and UX bugs and test for mobile website accessibility.
These tools allow you to catch visual and functional errors, but they may not replicate real-world conditions like hardware performance, battery usage, or certain network issues.
They’re great for early-stage testing but should be supplemented with real device testing for a complete view.
Best Practices for Mobile Website Testing
1. Test with the end user in mind
The success of your website depends on how well it meets your users’ expectations.
Therefore, behavioral analytics should be incorporated early to create a feedback loop. This will help ensure that your mobile website is aligned with user needs, allowing you to make necessary adjustments based on real-time feedback.
2. Prioritize core functionality
People use mobile websites for specific purposes.
Users will leave regardless of design features if the core functionalities — like navigation, sign-ups, or making purchases — don’t work smoothly. Ensure your testing strategy prioritizes these essential functions first to avoid disrupting the user experience.
3. User experience matters too
User experience is a close second to functionality. Nobody wants a website with a clunky layout or slow load times, even if it fulfills the main purpose. Have beta users test it as soon as the prototype or design mock-up is ready so you can adjust the UX before moving on to other tests.
Of course, conduct a final round of UX tests before your site goes on the market.
4. Test early, test often
Incorporate test automation early in the process to catch issues as they arise. Parallel testing across multiple devices and configurations helps ensure a smooth workflow without bottlenecks, enabling continuous quality assurance.
It’s also vital to use a mix of automated and exploratory testing. When testing mobile websites, you want to balance script-based and exploratory testing.
Script-based testing is suitable for decoding bugs and identifying functional issues. In contrast, exploratory testing is key to understanding how users interact with the site and what special usage conditions might need to be considered.
5. Be aware of platform testing considerations
Is yours a web-based app, a native app, or a combination of the two? With web-based apps, you’ll need to test for a wide range of browsers for performance and load and assess how responsive the website is across different device sizes and screen resolutions.
Native apps offer more control that way, as you’re testing the overall experience on one device at a time. However, you’ll have to accommodate different operating systems and device hardware types.
6. Define a device selection strategy
Testing your site on every combination of browser, device, and OS is not humanly possible.
Use market and end-user data to define a support policy for the devices and platforms you will test. Revisit it every three months to ensure you’re catering to the greatest number of end users.
7. Optimize for page load speed
Speed is essential for mobile users.
Compress images, minimize redirects, leverage browser caching, and reduce server response times to optimize load speeds. Regularly test your mobile website’s speed under various network conditions to keep load times as short as possible, improving user retention and experience.
8. Keep the emotional engagement factor in mind
There are hundreds of websites launched every day, but only a few ever make it to the top — and that’s because they resonate with users in a deep way, beyond just fulfilling a functional purpose or offering a sleek UX.
Therefore, test your site’s emotional engagement with a focus group of end users and strategize how to tweak certain elements to entice users to return.
5. Be aware of platform testing considerations
There are hundreds of websites launched every day, but only a few ever make it to the top — and that’s because they resonate with users in a deep way, beyond just fulfilling a functional purpose or offering a sleek UX.
Therefore, test your site’s emotional engagement with a focus group of end users and strategize how to tweak certain elements to entice users to return.
Future Trends in Mobile Web Testing
As technology evolves, so do the expectations for mobile website testing. Here are a few trends that will shape 2025 and beyond.
1. Growth of low-code automated testing
Low-code tools for non-technical testers to evaluate websites are more abundant than ever before. This is incredibly valuable, as it allows developers with the deepest insights to take the lead in testing. Their feedback on the user experience provides them with critical information to refine their own testing efforts.
2. Making every mobile app accessible
A significant percentage of any target audience has disabilities, and launching websites that aren’t designed for accessible use not only alienates them but could also be grounds for legal liabilities for your company. Developers, therefore, are working to incorporate accessibility into every stage of the mobile website testing process.
3. MTTD and MTTR as priorities
The pressure is on to launch sites rapidly while ensuring they’re error-free. Developers are thus keen to reduce the mean time to detection (MTTD) and the mean time to resolution (MTTR).
Monitoring DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics is an excellent way to approach this. These include the frequency of deployment, the lead time for changes, the mean time to recovery, and the change failure rate.
Test Your Mobile Website With TestGrid
TestGrid’s real device testing on the cloud provides an easy way to test your mobile apps and websites on real devices, ensuring you capture 100% authentic user experiences.
Instead of relying on emulators or simulators, which may not reflect real-world performance, you can run your tests using a wide combination of actual devices and browsers.
Another thing: ensuring your website performs consistently across multiple browsers is essential for delivering the best user experience.
With cross-browser testing capabilities, you can test your site on hundreds of real browsers, simulating how different users experience your site.
In Conclusion
We live in a world of instant gratification and aggressive competition. The quality of your mobile website experience can make or break your business. Ensuring a seamless, secure, and speedy mobile browser experience is non-negotiable.
Source: This article was originally published at testgrid.io.
Top comments (1)
Excellent work.