Mobile Website Testing: Strategies, Tools & Techniques

As a leading Full-Service Agency, KONABOS caters to the diverse digital needs of numerous organizations. Among the essential client requirements, ensuring mobile-friendly website design and thorough mobile testing have emerged as top priorities. The escalating demand for mobile testing is evident as smartphone usage continues to surge. This underscores the vital role of developing websites with mobile-friendly designs for the overall growth and success of any organization. In this blog, we'll delve into the essence of mobile testing, distinguishing it from desktop testing, discussing techniques and tools essential for effective mobile testing, exploring the testing strategies, and much more. Join us as we navigate through the intricacies of ensuring optimal performance across mobile platforms. 

What’s is Mobile Website Testing? 

Mobile web testing, also known as mobile web responsiveness testing, is an also form of testing performed to verify if the website performs uniformly across different browsers and screen resolutions by proving better user experience. Its primary objective is to ensure that websites display consistently and effectively on various mobile devices, regardless of their specifications or operating systems. 

Why to Perform Mobile Website Testing? 

Performing mobile web testing is essential due to the diverse ways in which website users access content across different browsers and devices. With varying screen resolutions across browsers, optimizing websites for seamless functionality becomes imperative to avoid losing potential customers. Mobile testing ensures website responsiveness across multiple devices, offering several advantages for businesses: 

• Enhanced Accessibility: A mobile-friendly website ensures easy access through various browsers on a range of devices, including iPhones and Android smartphones. 
• Device Compatibility: Testing website functionality across different mobile devices and various screen widths & resolutions ensures compatibility, allowing businesses to prioritize development and testing based on client requirements. 
• Improved Search Ranking and Speed: Google prioritizes mobile-friendly websites in search rankings, leading to higher visibility and increased traffic. Responsive mobile views contribute to faster loading times, enhancing user experience and business growth. 
• Enhanced User Experience: Mobile-friendly websites provide a superior user experience compared to desktops, fostering trust and engagement. Through device-specific responsive testing, businesses can ensure an appealing and functional website across mobile platforms. 

What is the Key difference b/w Mobile Vs Desktop Website Testing? 

While testing mobile and desktop share some common principals like functional and usability testing, while the core functionality of website remains same, mobile testing requires additional considerations due to few differences which are discussed below: 

• Screen Size & Resolution: Mobile devices typically have different screen sizes, orientation and varying resolutions compared to desktop computers which are usually large screen and higher resolution. This difference can impact the layout, content visibility, and user experience of the website. 
• Touch vs. Mouse Interaction: Mobile devices rely on touch-based interactions, while desktop computers use mouse or trackpads. This difference in input methods can affect the usability and functionality of the website. Mobile testing involves validating touch gestures, tap targets, and swipe actions on interactive elements on touchscreen devices whereas Desktop testing involves ensuring the interactive elements responds correctly to mouse clicks. 
• Navigation: Mobile websites typically use hamburger menus or other collapsible navigation systems to conserve space, Testing involves ensuring that navigation is accessible and user-friendly on smaller touch screens. While Desktops websites often have menus and navigation bars that are displayed horizontally across the top or vertically along the side of the screen.  
• Performance and Load Times: Mobile networks often have slower speeds and higher latency compared to wired desktop connections. Testing on mobile devices includes assessing performance under different network conditions to ensure fast loading times and responsiveness, especially on slower mobile networks. 

How to Create an Effecting Testing Strategy for Mobile website Testing? 

Creating an effective testing strategy for mobile website testing involves careful planning and consideration of various factors to ensure comprehensive coverage and efficient testing.  

Below is the list of information to be gathered to plan for the effective mobile testing: 

Understanding Requirements: Review the requirements and use cases to understand the intended functionality and user interactions of the website. 

Identify Key Stake Holders: Important establish a clear communication channels and collaboration mechanisms to facilitate effective testing with different stakeholders such as project managers. Product owners, developers and business users. 

Define Test Objective: Clearly outline the objectives of mobile website testing, such as ensuring functionality, usability, performance, compatibility, security, and accessibility. Prioritize testing objectives based on project requirements and user expectations. 

Define Testing Scope:  Scope should include the specific features, functionalities, and user flows that need to be tested while considering factors such as device types, screen sizes, operating systems, browsers etc. 

Testing Techniques: After determining the objective and Scope of testing finalise the testing technique and tools to perform the manual or automation testing. 

Identify Test Scenario’s: Based on the requirements and use cases, identify the key functionalities and user flows that need to be tested. 

UI & UX Components: Assess the UI design, layout, and navigation to ensure consistency, clarity, and ease of use. Pay attention to elements such as fonts, colors, icons, and interactive elements. 

What are Tools & Techniques to use for performing mobile website testing? 

Mobile website testing requires a combination of tools and techniques to ensure that the website functions correctly and provides a good user experience across various mobile devices and platforms. Below are the few tools and techniques, 

Responsive Design Testing Tools: These tools help testers evaluate how a website responds to different screen sizes and orientations.  

Examples: Browser developer tools such as Chrome DevTools.  

Emulators and Simulators: They replicate the behavior of mobile devices on a desktop computer, allowing testers to test websites without needing access to physical devices. 

Examples: Android Emulator for testing Android devices, iOS Simulator for testing iOS devices 

Real Devices: Testing on real devices provides the most accurate test results by giving clear picture how a website will perform and appear to users in real time. Testers can also use a combination of popular devices with different screen sizes, resolutions, and operating systems to ensure comprehensive testing coverage. 

Cross Browser Testing Tools:  These tools allow testers to test the website compatibility on wide range of browsers, operating systems and mobile devices. 

Example: LaMDA Test, Browser stack  

Manual Testing: It involves human testers navigating the website on real devices or emulators to identify usability issues, Ui components, navigations, visual glitches, and other issues that automated tools may miss. 

Techniques include exploratory testing, ad-hoc testing, and usability testing 

Automation Testing: Frameworks and tools can be used to automate repetitive tests, such as regression testing and cross-browser testing, to save time and ensure consistency. 
Examples: Selenium WebDriver, Appium,  

As we conclude, it's evident that testing websites on mobile devices is a critical aspect of delivering a superior user experience in today's mobile-centric world. By following best practices such as adopting responsive design, prioritizing cross-browser testing, testing on real devices, optimizing performance, validating mobile-friendly features, and leveraging automated testing, you can ensure that your website delights users across all platforms. Incorporate these strategies into your testing process to excel in mobile website testing and maintain a competitive edge in dynamic digital landscape.