How to find Bugs in your Website?

Before launching a website, all developers must identify any bugs present in it. Try their best to get rid of them. There are several reasons due to which there can be bugs in a website. Lack of development knowledge being among the major ones. Coding is an extremely important aspect of the website development process.

However, it often becomes quite complex to maintain and modify code. That is inefficiently or wrongly documented, which ultimately causes defects and bugs. Improper coding can result in improper validations of inputs, errors and unhandled exceptions. In certain cases, developers are working with faulty debuggers, compilers, and validators also end up having bugs on their website.

Misunderstanding the client requirements is also among the most common issues in website development that causes defects in the code. These misunderstandings can take place at different levels, such as requirement gathering, documentation, implementation, and so on.

While the client may have a good idea about what a website must look like. How it should behave, unless the web developers and testers do not orderly understand these elements, the ultimate result might not be as per their expectation.  The clients’ requirements need to communicate clearly by all the people working on a website. So that they reach the same level of understanding.

In addition to coding, design is another crucial component of the website development process. At times, designing a website takes a level of research if the software is too complex. Usually, developers have to complete design research, development and even testing of a website.

The software development process often is tedious and long, owing to which may end up making mistakes. Testing your website with tools and platforms like LambdaTest before it is launched would go a long way in enabling you to check for and correct those mistakes. However, unless you don’t conduct such a testing procedure, your end product may have bugs that shall hurt the user experience.

Pointers to find bugs in a website

No matter whether you are developing a website for a client, the organization you work for or even for personal use. It is extremely crucial that you see to it that the website is bug-free. Having a bug in your website can considerably affect your reputation as a developer, as well as ruin the usability of the app. Finding subtle bugs in your website can often be a challenging task, but with the right approach and tools in place, you can be successful in thoroughly testing your app and identify any glitches and bugs present there. For maximum efficiency, it is vital that you perform repeated tests with diverse test environments and subsequently try to find out a pattern in their results.

There are several types of tests that you can carry out to find bugs on your website. Here are some of them:

1. Mobile responsive test: As an increasing number of people today are using their smartphones to explore websites. Hence, to reach these users, your website must be fully responsive and compatible with discerning mobile devices and browsers.
2. Make a list of devices on which your website must run perfectly by searching through Google Analytics. You may even use the mobile device emulator extensions present in diverse browsers to test your application.
3. In case the budget of your project is too large, then you can provide your testing team with certain handheld devices of a varied operating system that makes real-time testing possible, as in many cases, bugs tend to get missed by emulators.
4. Try to make your website as mobile-friendly as possible. For this purpose, you should see to it that it does not require horizontal scrolling, all the buttons and fonts featured there are readable, and all its content scales seamlessly as per the screen size.
5. Cross-Browser Testing: Traditionally, Internet Explorer was the only browser available to people. But those days are long gone. Several new browsers cropped up in the market over the years, and new ones are being introduced with every passing day. In such a scenario, one may find a website running perfectly on Google Chrome or IE but not on Safari and Opera.
6. There are numerous types of browsers available today. However, rather than wasting your time to test the compatibility of your website with all of them. It would be more prudent to target the most popular and commonly used one.
7. You must try to carry out cross-browser compatibility testing during the early stages of website development. Unit testing subsequently should be initiated just after your web design is fully ready. The test cases must again be executed once the entire development completed seeing to it that there are no bugs in the final product.
8. Accessibility Testing: A series of standards and guidelines have set by the World Wide Web Consortium, which individuals or organizations should comply with prior to launching their website. As per these guidelines, websites must be accessible to all people, including the ones with any disability.
9. You must run a scalability test to make sure that the fonts and images present on your website are properly visible when zoomed in.
10. A screen reader test must be conducted to see to it that people having poor vision. Do not face many difficulties in navigating through your website by using a screen reader.
11. Your website should ideally be wholly navigable with the usage of just the keyboard.
12. Captions must be featured in the media content to ensure that people having a hearing disability can orderly understand any audio and video presentation on the website.
13. General HTML and CSS Checking:  You must ensure that your XHTML or HTML is absolutely error-free. There are a wide range of tools that you can use to search the code for missing titles, duplicate meta tags, broken links and other bugs.  After your code has checked, you can use the CSS Compressor to shrink the entire code into a single line. So as to speed up the loading time of your website.
14. Security testing: Carrying out a systematic security testing procedure is extremely important if your website deals with online banking.
15. You should ensure that the account locks out after several entries of incorrect user ID or/and password.
16. Automated login typically must be prevented with the help of techniques like CAPTCHA or OTP verification while trying to log into the website.  The encryption of cookies and cache should also be checked.
17. Performance Testing: In addition to taking care of proper security and usability, it is important to make sure that your website is able to withstand the load. There are many instances where websites end up crashing in case the web traffic surges up all of a sudden.
18. Perform stress testing to find out how your website would behave if its workload increases.
19. Stimulate login sessions of several uses and go on to executing concurrency. Testing with the aim of finding out whether the website is behaving normally or not.
20. Go through endurance testing to check the website’s performance as it faces workloads beyond its limitations. Check its loading time low network coverage.
21. Real users beta testing: The ultimate phase of testing when the website launched, and the end-users able to test it for errors. This testing phase is extremely crucial. As it enables the users to navigate the website and discover any weak points on it from their perspective. While your development team ideally shall use a set of rules. While performing unit testing, these users are prone to thinking out of the box and may end up finding an error or bug that has been missed by you.

In addition to the testing methods underlined above, documentation testing should ideally be performed. After your website passes all of the test cases and you have managed to fix all the high-priority bugs, you can go ahead and launch it.

Common Types of bugs Detected During testing

• Browser Adaptability: The website doesn’t open properly on certain browsers or its versions
• Authentication Fields: Unacceptable characters entered into the authentication fields of the website
• Page resolution: The layout or solution of the website gets distorted when viewed on smaller screen sizes

One of the best ways to test your browser for bugs would be through LambdaTest. Through this cloud-based cross-browser testing tool. You can test your website across more than two thousand browsers, devices and operating systems. In addition to both automated and manual cross-browser testing, this platform also allows you to carry out responsive testing. LambdaTest would be among the best tools to help you build a robust, functional and bug-free website.  When people visit your website, they might be using any browser; such are Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer. Without thorough cross-browser testing through platforms like LambdaTest. You won’t be able to catch bugs that only appear in certain browsers.