Bugs can occur in any digital system, from software to mobile apps and websites, and sometimes these bugs can cause tremendous chaos and negative impact on the bottom line. The more traffic a website receives, the greater an impact a bug can cause.
An interesting example is the case of the collapse of a U.S. government healthcare website. On 1 October 2013, the healthcare.gov website was launched, but many users experienced crashes, delays, errors, and slow performance after its release. The site had over 4 million unique visitors on the first day, but only six people were able to successfully enrolled in health plans due to bugs on the site. Even those who registered and shopped online encountered frustrating errors and confusing duplicates in their applications.
As a result, the site had to be taken down for significant repairs during the first weekend because it was practically unusable. The project cost about $500 million, yet they didn’t focus their efforts on finding bugs. This disaster could have easily been avoided with some thorough web testing.
In this article, we’ll guide you step by step on how to find bugs on websites and suggest tools that you can leverage to improve web testing.
Before finding bugs, you need to choose the right approach. There are two common ways to find bugs on any website: manual testing and automation testing.
Manual testing is simply about manually interacting with website elements to see if anything does not work as expected. For example, if you want to test the login feature on your website you can navigate to the login page, then enter credentials of a registered user into the right fields. If you successfully log into the website, and you see the UI of a logged-in user, you know that the feature works fine.
However, that only addresses a “valid credential” scenario, and sometimes users also input “invalid credentials,” so you also need to intentionally type incorrect username and password combinations to see how the system responds. Similarly, there are many other scenarios that fall under the login/registering feature that you should test, including:
Manual testing is suitable for small-scale websites with simple features. However, when it comes to more advanced websites with thousands or even millions of pages having interconnected features, performing manual testing alone can be exhausting.
Read More: Manual Mobile Testing: A Complete Guide
Here testers may want to leverage web automation testing to test repetitive test cases. They can code test scripts using popular automation frameworks like Selenium, or choose an automation testing tool that offers the features that they need.
The ultimate decision on whether to choose manual testing depends on many factors. If you are building a hobby site, have limited budget, or your testing needs are not too high, manual testing is a great choice. However, as your website scales, automation testing will be extremely valuable in helping you find bugs faster, more efficiently, and with no human errors, which can deliver significant ROI in the long run. Many QA teams usually go for a hybrid approach — automating repetitive tasks but still using manual testing in website areas that require a human touch.
Read More: Manual Testing vs. Automation Testing: A Full Comparison
Now that you have decided on the approach to use, the next step is to choose the right testing type. Each testing type allows you to find a different type of bug, and may require a unique type of tool. Below is a comprehensive list of testing types that you should consider with areas that they cover and suggestions on how to test:
Testing Type | Areas Covered | How To Test |
Feature functionality, user interactions, navigation, forms, error handling | - Design comprehensive test scenarios including positive and negative cases - Leverage data-driven testing for cases that need a wide variety of input data sets | |
Usability Testing | User-friendliness, overall user experience, website layout, navigation | - Involve representative user groups - Look for bugs related to layout, design, readability, intuitiveness, error messages, and ease of navigation |
Tests application programming interfaces, data transmission | - Test each API endpoint; validate the request/response data structure, format, and content - Try creating, updating, deleting, and retrieving data through the API to see how it processes and stores data | |
Functionality and usability on mobile devices, responsive design | - Test your website on different screen sizes and operating systems - If applicable, also test offline functionality | |
Performance Testing | Website performance, response times, scalability | - Test for slow loading pages, long response times, broken images or media, inefficient scripts, memory leaks, and any bottlenecks that affect the user experience - Test under several network conditions |
Security Testing | Identify and mitigate security risks, data protection | - Look for bugs related to insecure login mechanisms, cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, cross-site request forgery (CSRF), insecure data transmission, and inadequate access controls - Test the website's authentication and authorization mechanisms |
Website accessibility for users with disabilities, screen reader support | - Test for compatibility with screen readers, keyboard navigation, alternative text for images, color contrast, and adherence to web accessibility guidelines (WCAG) |
Cross-browser testing is an important activity when finding bugs on websites. There are currently 63,000+ possible browser-device-OS combinations that provide an extremely unique browsing experience for each user. Someone browsing on Safari using an iPhone 14 with the latest updates experiences a completely different website compared to someone browsing on Google Chrome using a Dell laptop with a 15.4” screen. Without cross-browser testing, you risk serving your diverse user base a negative web experience.
The key is to find out what browsers-devices-OS the majority of your users are using and conduct testing on them in order to catch bugs easily.
If you work with a comprehensive team, the development team will handle the troubleshooting of the bugs you find. To report and track bugs, you can simply use Google Sheets. Open up a new spreadsheet, then add bug categories to help you better classify any bugs you find. A good list of bug categories include:
You can also add another column for Bug status, with dropdowns that include In Progress, To be Retested, Fixed. For more advanced needs, you can leverage bug management tools with more tailored features.
Read More: A Comprehensive Website QA Checklist
Katalon is a comprehensive quality management platform that simplifies all aspects of web testing. You receive all the features you need to find bugs on websites in a single platform:
Without a single line of code, you can construct a test that can be automatically executed whenever you want. Katalon also has a Record-and-Playback feature to record the actions on your browser and turn them into a full test script. What’s even better is that you can build new keywords by yourself, so there is always room for customization.
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