Are you still struggling to perform a mobile-friendly test? This can be a massive problem as we are slowly moving to an industry where all the major websites will only be accessed on mobile devices. So, what’s the solution? It is high time for you to start investing in a mobile-friendly test environment.
Don’t know how to do so? Don’t worry! We are here for you. Our article will help you understand all the methods and tools for running effective mobile-friendly test cases on your website. We’re going to also help you with all the best practices to guarantee the best usability and search engine rankings for your web app.
Why Run A mobile-friendly Test
Are you still doubtful about why should you invest in a mobile testing environment in the first place? Fair enough! Let’s clarify that first. Here, you ensure that your website performs in the same manner even on smaller screens to improve the user experience and prevent frustration due to navigation difficulties, unreadable text, or improperly loading apps.
When it comes to search engine optimization, mobile tests can also help you in this process, as Google uses mobile friendliness as a ranking factor. It will have a very important role in your SEO and visibility when users search for your website.
Methods To Run A mobile-friendly Test
While making a mobile-friendly test, you can follow various methods to initiate this process. To shed more light over this segment, we have mentioned some of the most popular methods for this step:
- Google’s mobile-friendly testing tool is one of the easiest ways to quickly understand your website’s mobile compatibility. How? You just have to visit Google’s mobile-friendly test page, enter your website URL, and check if it’s working. After this, Google will automatically analyze the page and give you a very simple report of whether it is mobile-friendly or not.
- You can also use Google search console to have valuable information about mobile-friendly issues across your website. For this, you just have to log into the Google search function account and find the mobile usability option that will be present under the experience tab. You can review the reports of issues on your website and the recommendations to solve them.
- Another popular way of performing this process is using the developer tools that are present in almost all the browsers that you use. If you’re using Google Chrome to access the mobile website, you can use the Chrome debugging tools to understand the usability of your application on mobile browsers. Want a pro tip? Use the desktop Chrome to verify the visual consistency of your app.
How To Perform mobile-friendly Testing
Excited to run mobile-friendly testing? To help you with this process, we have mentioned all the steps that you need to follow in the correct order:
1. Primary Check
Start by first testing the mobile friendliness of your current website. To perform this step, you can easily use Google’s mobile-friendly test tool to perform a quick initial assessment.
As soon as you receive the report, you have to properly note all the identified issues and suggestions for improvements. This will help you create a baseline image for all your future testing processes.
2. Detailed Analysis With Browser Tools
You also need to perform a mobile-friendly test for your application across multiple devices. You can perform this process by using the dedicated browser developer tools that are available in all the current browsers for both mobile and desktop.
While performing these test cases, you should be especially careful to check various screen resolutions and dimensions. This is one of the most important steps to ensure proper accuracy throughout the testing process.
3. Cross-Device Testing
One of the major mistakes that you can make while performing mobile-friendly testing is to generalize your test cases. You must remember that although there are thousands of mobile devices available in the current market, all of them are unique in terms of hardware and software capabilities.
You cannot make assumptions like if an application is performing smoothly on one device, it will have the same performance on other devices as well. So, cross-device testing is one of the most important components of ensuring a mobile-friendly approach to your test environment.
4. Performance Analysis
You cannot overlook the performance of an app, especially if it is supposed to run on mobile devices. Provide the best loading speeds and optimized usage experience to your customers. The most efficient yet effective way of implementing this approach is to start using tools like PageSpeed Insights and WebPageTest.
Another thing that you can never forget is that loading time can also differ depending on the device or the browser that your end users might be using. So, you must consider testing the load times on a sizable variety of devices and browsers to establish baseline information.
5. Issue Resolution
In all the above steps, you will identify a lot of images that might be restricting the mobile compatibility of your application. Depending on all the errors that you have documented, it is time to start resolving this. But you must remember that all of these issues will not have the same priority when it comes to optimal end-user satisfaction.
So you must create a list of these depending on their priority and then systematically resolve them. This ensures that all the basic functions of an application are available to the end users at all times.
The common fixes for mobile-friendly issues include viewport settings, resizing buttons, optimizing images, and also improving the load times across slower network connections or outdated browser versions.
6. Validation And Retesting
The final step in this process is to validate the functioning of your application after you have implemented all the fixes. You can perform this process by again navigating to Google Search Console and rerunning the test.
After you’re convinced that the issues have been resolved, you can validate the resolution manually and clear the issues. Then, your application is ready to be forwarded to deployment, so that it can be released to the end users.
Automated Mobile Testing
While you’re performing automated mobile testing, it is also equally important to start integrating real device testing so that you can understand how the performance of your mobile applications changes depending on the physical functions of multiple mobile devices.
As we all know, it’s a very expensive and hectic process to set up and maintain a real device test lab. So, what is the effective solution? You start investing in cloud platforms like LambdaTest that can help you run the automated test cases on thousands of different device combinations through remote servers.
Let us learn more about this process by using the reference of LambdaTest as our discussion point:
LambdaTest is an AI-native test orchestration and execution platform that lets you perform manual and automation testing at scale with over 3000+ browsers, OS combinations, and 5000+ real devices.
With LambdaTest, you can also perform Selenium mobile testing so that you can run automated mobile application testing and automated mobile cross-browser testing. Want to learn more? The following sample code will help you gain more understanding about this process:
The Best Practices for Mobile-Friendly Testing
Finally, let us divert our attention towards some of the best practices that we recommend you to add while executing mobile testing. This is because with this approach, you can ensure not only high-quality apps but also better productivity of the entire testing environment:
- It is very important to place proper emphasis on implementing regular testing. You should schedule monthly or quarterly mobile-friendly tests that will help you to proactively identify all the issues and rectify them before they are released to the end users. It is also important to constantly monitor the updates so that you are changing the test cases depending on all the new features added.
- We will recommend you to use frameworks like Materialize as they will help you to implement responsive testing with your mobile applications. This is a very important parameter to ensure that your web application can accommodate the changing screen size, orientation, or the display resolution.
- It is a very good idea to keep the overall content for the application concise and accessible. You should also prioritize the readability and user-friendly navigation to ensure that all the required elements and actions are easily accessible even on smaller mobile devices. This is one of the most important actions to create an inclusive design for your apps.
- Loading times are one of the most important aspects that can make or break the mobile apps. Why you ask? Well, mobile users expect their apps to load within 2 seconds! You can achieve this by implementing techniques like image compression, minifying CSS elements, using browser caching, and utilizing content delivery networks.
- While you’re adding automation testing for mobile apps, you should also remember that certain segments of the testing process, like exploratory testing and visual UI comparison testing, cannot be automated. So, the perfect balance is to maintain proper coordination between manual overwatch and automated repetitive testing.
- You should also keep up with all the upcoming trends in the segment of software testing. For example, it is a great opportunity to start integrating advanced practices like artificial intelligence and machine learning within your test case for using features like self-healing test scripts and automatic test case generation.
These are not all the best practices. There will be certain specific ones that need to be customized for your project. So, develop a clear understanding of the app requirements so that you can create the required strategies.
The Bottom Line
Based on all the points that we have put forward in this article, we can easily say that performing regular and thorough mobile testing will ensure that a website meets all the modern standards for usability, performance, and SEO rankings.
By using all the tools and best practices that we have mentioned in this article, you can provide smooth mobile experiences that will help improve the user satisfaction and also boost your website’s visibility on mobile search results.
We would encourage you to immediately start investing in changing your strategies and testing approach so that you can accommodate a mobile-first approach and provide the best experience to your customers to boost your brand reputation and reach.
