Regularly testing your eCommerce website's performance ensures that you provide the best experience for your customers. It also means that your website is running at optimal levels to compete with others on search engines.
So, let's look at what website testing you should conduct and some of the most used eCommerce website testing tools available in 2024. These testing tools for ecommerce can help you measure speed, test accessibility, monitor user experience, evaluate search engine and browser compatibility, locate broken links, and check mobile friendliness.
What are some of the eCommerce Website Testing Categories?
Having precise eCommerce testing is not merely limited to improving security functionalities. Effective eCommerce testing is more about making all the involved elements of the platform functionally robust and safeguarded. Here are diverse eCommerce website testing categories leveraged for online stores.
A) Functional Testing
Ecommerce websites need more functionality than other websites, such as testing login and logout, search options, filtering out payment, and other indispensable aspects of your e-store that will help solidify first-time visitors into loyal customers. Some eCommerce website tools best for functional testing are UFT and Selenium.
Know in depth about : Functional Automation Testing: Types, Benefits and Tools
B) Compatible Testing
When launching your eCommerce store, you must ensure that customers can access it using any browser. Ecommerce tools like BrowserStack, browser shots and CrossBrowser testing are the best tools for ecommerce to check that your overall website compatibility is functioning. Another important aspect of compatibility testing is conditioned by the ubiquity of mobile phones that keep growing popular for online transactions.
C) Security Testing
Customers need to feel that their personal and financial data is safe from unauthorized utility and that all transactions they make will not lead to them losing their money or personal details. eCommerce security testing involves checking payment gateways, preventing login or registration functions hacking, and SQL injection vulnerability. The most efficient ecommerce testing tools for running security tests are Iron Wasp and ZAP.
D) Performance Testing
Performance testing of eCommerce websites ensures that the page speed is optimized, so customers do not need to wait. Your webpage loading speed is tested in performance testing, including data transfer, database performance, throughput, and traffic load tolerance. The most popular eCommerce performance testing tools are JMeter and Load Runner.
E) Usability Testing
The success of your eCommerce website depends on how well users can navigate it, aka, how friendly it is. It also includes foolproof site navigation, smooth checkout and payment options, clarity of content, simplicity of filtering, the convenience of the shopping cart, and other details of website design and operation that helps make interacting with your eCommerce store problem-free. Some of the best tools for this are Unbounce and Google Analytics Content Experiment.
Why is your eCommerce Website's Speed Extremely Important?
The speed at which a web portal loads is perhaps the most significant prerequisite for any website, specifically an eCommerce site. As internet speeds have upsurged exponentially in recent times, so has the user tolerance for viewing sites that take more time to load perfectly.
The eCommerce website testing tools are used to attain a higher speed for your online stores. Enhancements in website speed upsurge SEO friendliness, enhance User Experience (UX), reduce bounce rate, offer improved search capability, and bring an increase in revenue with profitability.
As per a survey, every second of load time enhancement of eCommerce websites equated to at least a 2 percent conversion boost and increased revenue growth. By increasing the eCommerce store speed, you will receive more traffic and appeal to more qualified leads that you can then turn into a loyal client base, eventually advancing your sales and producing more yields.
What are Some of the Most Used Testing Tools to Test your eCommerce Store Speed?
Let us explore the most utilised ecommerce testing tools to test your online store effectiveness and accuracy levels with respect to speed.
1) GTmetrix
This free webpage testing tool will showcase how fast your eCommerce site loads and provide detailed information on what makes your website load slowly. The most significant advantage of this specific tool is that it analyses your website performance using both PageSpeed and YSlow.
The results are then colour-coded, showcasing performance scale, full loading time, page weight, and multiple requests. These can help fine-tune your website to increase performance.
Overall, the interface is easy to use - type in your URL and click on 'analyze.' With GT Metrix, you can monitor your store and track performances such as video playback testing and performance reports.
At the pro level, you can access features such as exportable reports, website monitoring, page settings, testing from multiple locations, creating video reports to showcase loading time step-by-step, and automatic alerts.
Price -
Basic - Free
Solo - $10.65/month
Starter - $21.25/month
Growth - $42.50/month
Sucuri load time test cross-checks how long it takes to connect your site and to load a web page completely. You can easily and effortlessly check the performance of any site from anywhere with such testing.
Load time tester tool by SUCURI checks your web portal from 15+ places and offer you time taken from every place, average response, and performance-based grade for enhancements.
If your site is not loading swiftly, it will lose significant traffic in the longer run. As Google prioritze quick loading sites, the sluggish ones are lost at the bottom. Cross-checking website speed and taking actions to optimize it is highly critical for more audience to stay around.
Price - Free
This free Google tool can help you check your store's performance quickly. The most significant gain is that it provides a detailed description of how fast your site is loading and recommendations to make your eCommerce site faster.
Optimization suggestions are based on general webpage performance metrics, including resource caching download size and data upload. Merely enter your site URL and pause for some seconds.
Google will analyze mobile and desktop versions and provide suggestions based on priority from high to medium to low. This will help you choose which steps to take, as they have an enormous impact on your website in general.
All results on Google PageSpeed insights are colour-coded so that you immediately know how well your website performs. Here a score above or around 90 is fast, 50-90 is average, and below 50 is regarded as slow.
Price - Free
4) DebugBear
It is essential to track website swiftness and core web vitals. DebugBear tool enables performance tracking and automatically finds issues on your website portal and highlights the information you require to fix.
By optimizing web performance you can better enhance user experience (UX) and rank superiorly in Google.
Price -
Basic - $25/month ($300 billed yearly)
Essential - $79/month ($948 billed yearly)
Pro - $159/month ($1,908 billed yearly)
Corporate - $399/month ($4,788 billed yearly)
Pingdom's page speed tool is another free online tool that you can leverage to test your eCommerce store loading time. Similar to Google, it provides the best practice to help increase your website's overall health and speed.
Pingdom's reports include a waterfall breakdown, overall page analysis, performance grade, and performance history tracking. The tool is also easy to use - add the URL, choose a test area, and conduct the test.
The Pingdom tool lets you check whether your webpage is fast or slow. You can check your file and folder sizes, page size, loading time, performance grade, and other details.
Price - 30-day free trial
Starter - $15/month
6) WebPageTest
The WebPage Test platform helps conduct both simple and advanced website speed testing. The grading system varies from A to F based on multiple performance aspects like Time To First Byte (TTFB) compress images, compress transfer, effective use of CDN, and cache static content.
The dashboard is configured for various locations and performs advanced testing, including multi-step transactions, content blocking, video view, and other features.
The report from the WebPage Test is divided into six sections - summary, performance review, details, content breakdown, screenshots, domains, request maps, and image analysis.
Price - Free
7) Uptrends
Uptrends help you quickly survey your website performance and provide relevant metrics to improve aspects like loading time, requests, and page size. The platform offers website uptime monitoring, web performance monitoring, web application monitoring, API monitoring, and server monitoring. Each report is broken into two aspects - waterfall breakdown and domain groups.
The domain group showcases a unique perspective as it categorises the resources into separate sources such as first-party, CDN, statistics, uncategorized, social, ads, first-party overall, and third-party overall.
The Uptrends platform is convenient to use and supports multiple worldwide locations. The dashboard UI is unparalleled. Also, if you want a well-designed and captivating website monitoring tool, this is perfect.
Price -
A 30-day free trial is available.
Starter - $14.17/month
Business - $22.61/month
Enterprise - $54.04/month
Key Takeaways
Tracking website performance and speed are some of the most critical aspects of providing an explicit user experience (UX), so you must ensure that your eCommerce website ranks higher. With our list of the most used eCommerce website testing tools, you can jump into the year 2023 with the best testing solutions in your hand.
You must thoroughly test your online stores as an eCommerce website builder and business owner. That way, your customers have the best user experience that ultimately translates to an increase in revenue and builds a solid brand reputation for your eCommerce store in the upcoming year.
If you are looking for a precise approach to enable your testing processes, check out our testing and QA services at Perfect QA Services. We can assist you in saving time, effort and funds by automating your testing procedures. Let us connect to discuss your QA and testing requirements to take this conversation further.