Test your Website for Mobile devices -The capacity of mobile devices to connect to the internet has grown in recent years. In reality, smartphones have surpassed desktop computers in terms of internet usage, capturing the majority of the market. According to Statista, mobile internet usage accounts for 50.4 percent of total global online traffic. 

Global mobile data traffic from 2018 to 2021 (in exabytes per month)  

The graph above clearly shows that mobile data traffic will increase rapidly in the coming years. Furthermore, it clearly shows that user expectations for mobile websites are higher than ever. This also implies that your website must be mobile-friendly in order to attract the right traffic and convert it into potential profit. To make your website mobile-friendly, you must conduct mobile website testing and ensure that it is responsive across a variety of smartphones and tablets. However, even with access to smart techniques such as mobile-first responsive web design, it is difficult for developers to perform mobile website testing, especially given the variety of smartphones in the market. 

Today, we’ll go over the best ways to test your website’s responsiveness across mobile devices. Before we finish, we’ll go over the best practices for mobile website testing.

Why is Mobile Website Testing Necessary?

Mobile website testing not only checks the responsiveness of your web app across multiple smartphones, but it also provides some additional benefits that can be advantageous to the company, such as:

Allows easy access to websites

A mobile-friendly website is operated using any browser on any mobile phone, including iPhone, Android, and Blackberry. Besides that, Google considers mobile-friendly websites to be a huge phenomenon, which means that having a mobile responsive view of your website will help you improve search engine rankings and gain more visitors to help the company grow.

Makes websites mobile device friendly

Mobile website testing ensures that your website is compatible with all major mobi

le phones. For example, it allows you to ensure that your web app works as expected across the targeted devices that users use to access it. You can also improve the ability of your web app across multiple devices.

Makes it easier to find websites

As previously stated, Google prioritises mobile websites over windows apps, which means that if you have a mobile-friendly website, users would be able to find it quickly across all web pages. Besides that, mobile phones are more available than desktop computers, making it easier for users to connect to the internet.

Provides both speed and accuracy

Users love to use their mobile phones to search for information, book movie tickets, browse social media sites, and do a variety of other things. This is primarily due to the convenience and efficiency of mobile phones. So, in order to provide people with full visibility to your website, it is critical to perform mobile website testing as well as responsive app testing.

Enhances User Experience

A mobile-friendly website gives benefits to the users than a desktop website because they can obtain all of your content on the site on a small and compatible device. It not only helps to gain more users, but it also builds users’ trust.

Enhances the appearance and usability of the website

You can ensure an appealing look and feel for your site across mobile phones by conducting device-specific responsive testing. Customers will experience it and return to it whenever they require any valuable information or service from your company’s website.

How Do You Carry Out Mobile Web Testing?

It is simple to test a website’s mobile view because there are numerous developer tools available to do so. For example, Google provides a variety of developer tools for viewing a website’s mobile view. These tools are also useful for mobile website testing because they provide specific information about the advancements that your website requires and how you can make them. 

However, given the wide range of mobile phones, manually testing your website on each device is not an optimal method. Moreover, smartphones have varying screen sizes, viewports, pixel densities, and network speeds. As a result, you must ensure that the website is thoroughly tested to account for all of these distinctions and produce the desired results. So, what can you do to get the best results from your mobile website testing? 

Let’s take a look at the top 5 areas to do it-

1. Use an emulator for iOS and Android.

Software emulators are also one of the most straightforward orders to check a website’s mobile version. Emulators continue to run the same software and applications as the original computer without having to change them, and they also help you distinguish between duplicate systems. While iOS and Android emulators are designed specifically for testing mobile apps, they can also be used to test your site’s mobile version in standard browsers. This will give you a good idea of how your website will look in each of the built-in browsers. The operating system can also assist you in identifying site accessibility or cross-browser issues. 

The iOS simulator is included with Xcode and is available for download from the Mac App Store. 

Since Xcode is only available for Mac operating systems, your web app can only be checked on iOS devices. You can use Windows Phone Simulator to test your website for Windows applications, as it comes with a full-featured SDK, different screen resolutions, screenshot software, and more.

You can download an Android Studio emulator for Android devices, which helps you to build a virtual mobile phone for testing Android apps and mobile websites. The Android Studio emulator is included in the Android SDK kit and is compatible with Windows, Mac OS and Linux.

2. Use the Responsinator Browser Tool

You can use browser tools like Responsinator to conduct sensitive testing of your mobile application throughout different screen resolutions. It is totally free to use and is good for checking the layout of your web app allows you to scale your website to a particular size so you can see how it would appear on different devices with different screen sizes. Follow the steps below to use the Responsinator tool: 

• Visit Responsinator’s official website.

• Click Go after entering the website’s URL in the provided area.

• It will begin producing live previews for the website based on common system resolutions.

Responsinator is an outstanding tool for conducting a website quick test. However, since it uses the same operating system as the mobile browser, it’s not as good as checking the site on actual devices or using a simulator.

3. Test On Real Devices

Since there are many occasions of a web app that cannot be tested with emulators or developer tools, testing it on real devices is the best approach for mobile website testing. The user experience on a website, for example, includes many factors such as pixel densities, varying network conditions, real page loading speed and time, and much more. All of these variables can be thoroughly tested on real-world devices. Of course, manually testing a web app across each device is difficult because it requires investment, resources, and time. Instead, you can use a mobile device test suite that includes the most popular mobile web browsers such as Chrome, Safari, Opera, Mozilla, Edge, and others. It will assist you in testing your site under actual situations and providing you with accurate results.

If you don’t want to use a mobile device test suite, you can use an automated mobile testing tool, which is designed to test a web app all over multiple smartphones and browsers.

5. Check the HTML and CSS code for UI errors.

Validating the website’s HTML and CSS code is recommended for analysing the usability of a web app throughout all platforms. You can now use open-source tools like W3C MobileOK Checker to test your HTML and CSS. It’s a web-based automated validation feature that enables you to test your website’s functionality with mobile devices. It offers you a range of test situations to ensure that your website is user-friendly.

Another choice is to use the Google Chrome Developer Tool to correct small issues with your site’s HTML and CSS. You can easily monitor the actions of your website across a range of screen sizes, load times, and network throttling with this application.

Best Practices For Mobile Website Testing

Before jumping into these methods, take a look at the practices listed below to ensure successful mobile website testing.

. Ensure that all predefined business needs and stakeholder expectations are met in order to get the most out of the testing process.

. Make a decision on which devices and mobile browsers you will use to test the sensitivity of your homepage.

. Mention the browsers’ testing priorities based on user patterns, largest traffic, and accessibility.

. Make sure to include browsers that are only occasionally used by users.

. Create a testing method that enables you to follow the rules and adhere to the standards to ensure quality and consistency.

. Consider how much time it will take to test all of the application’s components on all of the devices.

. Ensure that each screen size and mapping flow is thoroughly validated.

. By expanding or crumbling the browser window, you can define your own breakpoints depending on the merits and design of the web application.

. Determine what to expect when a testing procedure is executed while keeping all adjustments in mind throughout the sprint so that you can quickly update the test cases.

. To assess the website’s usability and adaptability, test its performance on various network speeds and internet connections.

You will be able to carry out successful mobile testing for your website if you follow the practices outlined above.

Conclusion

We certainly cannot argue that cell phones have become the preferred method of accessing the internet, not just because it is convenient but also because it is easy to use. As a result, companies must make their web applications mobile-friendly. To do the same, you must conduct mobile website testing on a variety of smartphones and tablets to ensure that it achieves the desired results. We expect that this blog has addressed some of the most effective approaches for testing a web app on mobile devices. Now is the time to bring them into motion!