What is Web Testing?

  • Web Testing, or website testing is checking your web application or website for potential bugs before its made live and is accessible to general public. Web Testing checks for functionality, usability, security, compatibility, performance of the web application or website.
  • During this stage issues such as that of web application security, the functioning of the site, its access to handicapped as well as regular users and its ability to handle traffic is checked
  • In Software Engineering, the following testing types/technique may be performed depending on your web testing requirements.
1. Functionality Testing:
  • Testing each and every field in depth according to the requirement comes under functional testing
  • This is used to check if your product is as per the specifications you intended for it as well as the functional requirements you charted out for it in your developmental documentation. 
  • Web based Testing Activities includes:
Test all links in your web pages are working correctly and make sure there are no broken links. Links to be checked will include -
  • Outgoing links
  • Internal links
  • Anchor Links
  • MailTo Links
Scripting checks on the form are working as expected. For example- if a user does not fill a mandatory field in a form an error message is shown.
Testing your end - to - end workflow/ business scenarios which takes the user through a series of web pages to complete.
Test negative scenarios as well, such that when a user executes an unexpected step, appropriate error message or help is shown in your web application.2. Usability testing:

2. Usability Testing 

UI has now become a vital part of any web based project. It can be carried out by testers like you or a small focus group similar to the target audience of the web application.
Test the site Navigation:
Menus, buttons or Links to different pages on your site should be easily visible and consistent on all webpages

 Test the Content:
Content should be legible with no spelling or grammatical errors.
Images if present should contain an "alt" text

 3. Interface Testing:

 Three areas to be tested here are - Application, Web and Database Server

  1. Application: Test requests are sent correctly to the Database and output at the client side is displayed correctly. Errors if any must be caught by the application and must be only shown to the administrator and not the end user.
  2. Web Server: Test Web server is handling all application requests without any service denial.
  3. Database Server: Make sure queries sent to the database give expected results.
  4. Test system response when connection between the three layers (Application, Web and Database) cannot be established and appropriate message is shown to the end user.

4. Compatibility testing


  • In compatibility testing we check according to H/W+S/W+OS.
  • Compatibility tests ensures that your web application displays correctly across different devices. This would include-
  • Browser Compatibility Test: Same website in different browsers will display differently. You need to test if your web application is being displayed correctly across browsers, JavaScript, AJAX and authentication is working fine. You may also check for Mobile Browser Compatibility.
  • The rendering of web elements like buttons, text fields etc. changes with change in Operating System. Make sure your website works fine for various combination of Operating systems such as Windows, Linux, Mac and Browsers such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari etc.

How to decide on which platform testing is to be done

  • Customer give us the list on which platform ,testing has to be done
  • On market condition or targeted user

 5. Performance Testing:

This will ensure your site works under all loads. Software Testing activities will include but not limited to -

  • Website application response times at different connection speed
  • Load test your web application to determine its behaviour under normal and peak loads
  • Stress test your web site to determine its break point when pushed to beyond normal loads at peak time.
  • Test if a crash occurs due to peak load, how does the site recover from such an event
  • Make sure optimization techniques like zip compression, browser and server side cache enabled to reduce load time

6. Security testing:

Security Testing is vital for e-commerce website that store sensitive customer information like credit cards. Testing Activities will include-

  • Test unauthorized access to secure pages should not be permitted
  • Restricted files should not be downloadable without appropriate access
  • Check sessions are automatically killed after prolonged user inactivity