Websites are not just repositories of information. They help businesses welcome potential users, capture interest, and generate sales. If you care about your website, want to stand out among competitors, or simply just deliver top-notch UX, web testing is essential.
In this article, we’ll learn:
Let's dive in!
Web testing is the process of checking a website to see if its functionality, security, and performance align with expectations. The goal of web testing is to ensure that no bugs slip into the production environment, thus maintaining web quality.
We’ll use Tripadvisor, a leading travel review site, as an example.
Receiving ~99M visitors per month, it can't afford a bug.
This is a screenshot of the homepage of Tripadvisor.
A typical list of test cases to run for this page includes the following:
And that is just the Homepage.
A complex website with interconnected functionality can have hundreds of scenarios to tested. QA teams usually adopt automation testing to speed up the process.
There are primarily two approaches to web testing:
The difference? With manual testing, you can actually test the site, while automated testing only checks the site.
This means manual testers can explore the website with a greater degree of freedom, allowing them to discover new and more complex bugs, while automation testers can only verify bugs they are programmed to identify.
Thorough web testing helps reduce defects by around 30% compared to less rigorous methods. It improves reliability across user scenarios.
A strong focus on user experience pays off: 88% of users won’t revisit a site that contains noticeable bugs or glitches.
Web testing contributes to polished user experiences and boosts confidence in the product.
Functional testing checks core features like forms, links, and login workflows.
UI testing examines layout, interaction, and server response behavior.
Compatibility testing ensures consistent display and functionality across devices, browsers, and operating systems.
Performance testing assesses load capability and scalability for peak traffic scenarios.
Web testing starts with requirement analysis. This is essentially a session for stakeholders to align the testing objectives. What should we test? How do we go about testing it? Manually or with automation?
After this discussion, the team arrives at a test plan. This plan outlines all testing activities to be done, the deliverables, test environments, schedule, and everything in between.
Here are some ideas for test case:
Once done, the real web testing process begins.
If the team decides to test it manually, they can just start interacting with the website and record the results in a spreadsheet.
If the team decides to automate tests, they can start writing automation scripts with a web test automation framework or an automation testing tool for web to assist them.
If any bug are found, the team documents the bug and reports back to the dev team for immediate troubleshooting.
To work with an automation framework requires knowledge and experience in coding. Plus, you need to continuously update the scripts upon code changes. Some of the most common frameworks are:
Selenium helps you send “commands” to the browser and interact with on-page elements by locating their selectors (XPath, CSS selectors, etc.).
Selenium relies on a client-server architecture. When you write scripts, they communicate with the WebDriver server, which then sends commands to the browser driver. After that, those drivers translate the commands into actions.
Here is an example of a Selenium script:
Here's a brief example of an automation test case in Selenium:
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
import time
# Initialize the Chrome driver
driver = webdriver.Chrome()
try:
# Open the login page
driver.get("https://example.com/login")
# Find username and password fields and enter credentials
username_field = driver.find_element(By.ID, "username")
password_field = driver.find_element(By.ID, "password")
username_field.send_keys("my_username")
password_field.send_keys("my_password")
# Submit the form
login_button = driver.find_element(By.ID, "login-button")
login_button.click()
# Optional: Wait for page to load
time.sleep(3)
# Verify login success (simple example: check URL or page text)
if "dashboard" in driver.current_url.lower():
print("Login successful!")
else:
print("Login failed or incorrect credentials.")
finally:
# Close the browser
driver.quit()This code:
2. Cypress📚 Read More: Top 7 Selenium Alternatives You Should Know
Similar to Selenium, Cypress also helps you automate on-screen actions on the browser. However, it takes a unique approach: Cypress runs tests directly within the browser, rather than remotely controlling it like Selenium.
This translates to faster tests and more efficient execution since all interactions of Cypress scripts align with real-time events on the web. However, Selenium offers a grid that allows you to run tests in parallel, while Cypress requires a paid orchestrator in the cloud or with a third-party product.
A good alternative to Cypress, Playwright also comes with easy-to-use methods. Playwright allows you to handle multiple tabs while testing, unlocking parallel test execution. Check out the Playwright documentation.
Playwright also has Trace Viewer, a GUI tool that helps you explore recorded Playwright traces after the script has run. Traces are a great way to debug your tests when they fail on CI, which can be a huge issue with Cypress.
📚 Read More: 10 automated web testing best practices