The Hidden Cost of Launching a Website Without Ongoing Testing

Launching a new website for your business is very exciting – you’ve been planning it, designing it, tweaking it and coding it for months. Now it’s finally live, time to sit back and relax, right? You’re dreaming! The hard part is only just about to begin.

The single most expensive thing to do to a website once it’s launched is to do nothing … It seems intuitively obvious that once a website is ‘live’, it is ‘done’, that it is time for someone else to worry about it. But it is also obvious that doing nothing while your site gathers dust is not wise. Ignoring your site’s need to be tested and monitored will quickly start you on the slippery slope towards having a site that is broken, is difficult and unpleasant for customers to use, and has lost its marketability.

In this post, I’ll present the case for why live site testing is necessary, and can help businesses avoid costly errors. Whether you’re a web developer, a digital marketer, or both, understanding the value can help make sure you’re spending your client’s money both effectively and efficiently.

Why Live Website Testing is Essential

The Illusion of Perfection

After a robust development cycle, it can be tempting to assume your website is bug-free – top to bottom. The truth is that no website is bug-free. Newly published pages, third-party integrations, client-side rendering… all these elements and many more can break at any given time. That’s why constant testing can help you catch those critical problems.

The Impact of Broken Links

Broken links could be more than irritating, turning you away from a website for one dead link – they are also bad for your SEO. Search engines such as Google penalize websites with broken links, reducing your site’s visibility on search results. Stick to making regular broken link checks to avoid missing any. That will ensure your SEO is functioning properly and your users can easily navigate your site. If you’ve redesigned your brand/website any broken backlinks will impact SEO. Adding a redirect from the old URL to a URL on your new website fixes this problem.

Functionality Issues

As time passes, websites also degrade as plugins do or don’t get updated, new pages get added, or as the makeup of visitors changes. Which item should I click when shopping for boots? Does this form actually submit my request? Does this page I landed on actually complete my purchase? Small functionality problems like these can lead to low satisfaction – and potentially to lost customers. Testing on an ongoing basis can help pinpoint and resolve functionality problems before users even see them.

Responsive Design Problems

If you’re not considering your website’s responsiveness across a multi-device world, you’ll almost certainly be losing a huge amount of your audience if it doesn’t respond well on desktops, tablets and smartphones. Testing across various devices and screen sizes will ensure your site’s seen in the best way by all your visitors, whether on a small device or large. If your website shows the exact same elements on both a large desktop browser and the small real-estate space of your smartphone screen, then you’re doing it all wrong. Desktops and smartphone website versions are different experiences with different page sizes.

User Experience (UX) Concerns

A good user experience is about making sure that visitors keep coming back, and about your conversions. Slow loading times, complex navigation, buttons which are not responding to user clicks etc can frustrate your users, and chances are they won’t ever come back. By maintaining the best user experience you will get more happy users.

Benefits of Live Site Testing

Diverse Content Scenarios

When a website is built using a content management system like WordPress, Sitecore, or Drupal it’s critical to test in production because this helps  ensure that all of the application’s content inputs – text, photos, videos and so on – are successfully processed without causing display problems that could disrupt what a user sees on their screen.

Complex Integrations

CMSs are often integrated with databases, other APIs and third-party services, all of which need to work together to make a functioning website. This is why production testing can surface problems in how a system integrates with the rest of the real world. When releasing a new feature into the real world, it’s essential that you can trust it to work correctly. Although testing in a development, staging, and a pre-live environment is recommended before deploying it live… nothing beats the live environment. End-to-end system testing is typically limited in test environments, which is why it’s necessary and critical to check and test in the live/production environment.

Real-World Data

Unlike a test environment, a production environment gives you access to real world data, and how real users interact with it. So, while you can’t force errors, even in a test environment, you might uncover them in production. Your production server will also show what it’s like when people who haven’t seen your website before stumble upon it.

Avoiding Bad Reviews

A buggy website will lead to poor ratings and, in the worst case, negative reviews, which hurts your brand image. Constant testing can maintain a positive brand image by keeping your site interactive and delivering a satisfying experience to your customers, making them leave good ratings and pass your site on to others.

Steps for Effective Live Website Testing

Implement Automated Testing Tools

Other tools will do regular checks for you so you don’t have to, with a fair level of thoroughness and consistency. Link checkers (for example, Screaming Frog) will save you from doing it manually; performance-auditing tools (such as Google Lighthouse) do the same for site speed; and automated analyses of search engine optimization (SEO) such as Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test or Alexa’s Site Audit (what SEO experts call a ‘crawl’) are also worth trying.

Schedule Regular Manual Audits

Automated tools are great, but they can’t pick up everything, and should never replace human testing. Automation comes with it’s own risks. Schedule some time to do regular manual audits, for example to look for problems with appearance or usability. This way, you’ll get both automated and manual testing coverage.

Monitor User Feedback

A site’s users are a good source of information about its performance. Ask for feedback and then listen to what they say in reviews and comments. If something is said repeatedly, that might be where you should focus your usability testing. Another way to monitor your website is via heatmaps that capture how users use your site.

Keep Software and Plugins Updated

Outdated software and plugins can leave you vulnerable to intruders and to programming incompatibilities. Keep your CMS, themes and plugins up-to-date and you’re less likely to have problems with security and compatibility in the future.

Test New Updates in a Staging Environment

You should always try any updates to your site in a staging environment before deploying them to your live site. With staging environments, you will be able to detect and solve problems before your site goes live with the update. Once the new version is stable, you can then deploy it to the production environment for your site.

Conclusion

Creating a site is just the start. If you are not regularly testing and maintaining your site, you could incur an expensive investment into your SEO, user experience and, ultimately, your business. Testing continuously means your site is always running its best.

A well-maintained website is a testament to your attention to detail and professionalism. After the big day, don’t let down your guard. Invest in testing so your site remains well-oiled like new. Make your site a vehicle for your business, not a liability.