The Ultimate Responsive Website Design Testing Checklist

Smartphones have revolutionized our lives, and you’re likely reading this on one. It’s hardly shocking to consider how pervasive mobile gadgets have become. Nearly half of people polled in a February 2021 survey conducted by L.Ceci via Statista spent five to six hours a day on their phones, not considering work-related smartphone use. 

Mobile devices handle more than half of all searches worldwide. Additionally, page speed is becoming a factor in mobile search engine rankings. Companies and bloggers must opt for a website theme that has been developed and optimized for speed.

This means if your website is not mobile-friendly,  you are missing more than half of your potential customers. It also implies that your website’s design and navigation must be consistent across all platforms and devices

This is where the ultimate responsive website design testing comes in. It ensures that your website displays correctly and functions smoothly on any computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone. The most accessible approach to ensure that you execute responsive design testing successfully is to follow a responsive design testing checklist, and in this article, we have done the hard work for you. 

What Is Responsive Web Design? 

Nowadays, people use various gadgets to access the internet and interact with websites. You can find these high-tech gadgets in multiple form factors and display sizes. Your site’s design and functionality must adapt to the screen size of every visitor accessing it. 

Responsive web design helps your site display correctly on all screen sizes and resolutions. This layout method adjusts the content’s visibility, size, and position in response to the viewing device, ensuring optimal readability and viewing experience across all devices. Later, you may use a free poster maker to create banners if you’re getting into traditional ads, but you should still follow your brand guidelines.

Conversely, your rivals are rolling out the red carpet for potential clients. Currently, smartphones are widely available, with 80 percent of internet users having one. Users in this demographic often devote 69% of their media consumption habits to their mobile devices. Without a mobile-friendly website, a company runs the danger of losing sales. Furthermore, about  57% of consumers said they wouldn’t suggest a firm with poorly designed websites also embed YouTube shorts, TikTok videos, and Instagram reels to make it more responsive to increase retention time. 

This shows the value of responsive web design, and if you care about keeping your audience and your business alive, you should seriously consider investing in it.

Ultimate Checklist For Responsive Design Testing

A responsive design should already be live on your website if you’ve updated it or gotten a new one during the past several years. A website that adapts to different devices’ screen sizes is now expected of users; hence most web design firms include responsive design in their primary offerings. However, optimizing your website for mobile devices isn’t a one-and-done deal.

Your website’s responsiveness should be tested with a responsive design checker and regularly updated per your responsive design testing checklist. 

1. Test For Navigation On Website

Use a navigation bar to direct visitors to certain parts of your site or specific pages. There are usually five or more buttons on a navigation bar. The menu bar must evolve with the device. No matter how much we tried to make the navigation bar smaller using the @media queries meta tag, it still wouldn’t be clickable on a mobile device. So, we’ve found that the “hamburger menu” works well on mobile devices. Because of its widespread use, users will actively seek it out if they have no choice. 

It should be standard practice to confirm that the navigation layouts work correctly across devices to ensure a positive user experience.

2. Perform Font Device Testing

Developers will often employ a wide range of typefaces and design approaches while composing text for a website to make it more aesthetically pleasing to the users. Devices that do not support these fonts, or use a different encoding system, may display them as gibberish. It is, thus, vital to test the typefaces on various devices before releasing them for actual website mobile responsive testing. 

3. Third-Party Browser and Device Testing

You should use Google Analytics data to examine online and mobile traffic, considering the browsers and devices used to access the sites. This should be done quarterly, with the latest OS and device and the old ones phased out. Consider including the beta versions to ensure your website is mobile-friendly. 

4. Conduct a Test on a Small Screen

With the constantly growing number of mobile users, having a website that doesn’t adjust to any screen size is no longer acceptable. That’s why keeping the mobile-first design strategy in mind when creating a responsive layout is crucial. Mobile phones and other small display devices should be a starting point for your design.

5. Test How Fast Your Website Is

You can track how well your components adapt to different screen sizes with responsive design. However, when considering mobile devices, which often operate on lower bandwidth, it becomes clear that rich content, such as photos, videos, etc., poses the greatest threat to the site’s loading speed. The loading time will grow proportionally if we keep using the same graphics we were producing on larger devices like laptops, which will frustrate your users. 

A mobile web page should only take four seconds to load. After two seconds, if your loader is still spinning, users will likely hit the back button. 

Web page load times can negatively affect even the most well-known companies. To paraphrase current findings from Hubspot’s research:

• Yahoo may see a boost of 9 percent in visitors if the company can shorten the time it takes pages to load by 0.4 seconds. 
• Amazon will lose $1.6 billion annually in sales should page load times increase by just one second.
• A 2. the second delay in Bing’s search results would result in a 4.3% drop in revenue per visitor, a 3.75 % drop in clicks, and a 1.8% drop in queries.

If your website loads slower than you’d like on these smaller devices, you may need to employ different strategies to present the same graphics.

6. Test Element Alignments

When working with limited space, element alignment becomes especially crucial. Everyone can readily identify a shape that is out of proportion and breaks the limits. The tester must verify that the website’s many parts are spaced adequately across the screen. Responsive web design will not be effective if it is not rendered and aligned correctly. 

7. Test For Content Placement

The larger viewing area of a desktop or laptop computer makes it simple to zero in on a specific component. In addition, because of the viewer-to-screen distance, we can examine every detail. However, mobile devices are an exception to this rule. Because of the limited real estate screen on mobile devices, we must be mindful of condensing unnecessary information. See below for a representation of where your attention should be drawn on a mobile device’s display:

• Edges, Corners (Least Precise) 
• Center (Most Precise) 

Determine if the location of the critical elements is inside this area and if the elements are not overly crowded. You can use web-based management software to plan and manage your content placement. 

8. Perform Compatibility Testing Across Multiple Browsers

The first thing you should do when testing a website for responsive design is to use a different browser on the device to see if it displays correctly. When you perform cross-browser compatibility testing, your website may be viewed and explored in any browser, operating system, or resolution. Manual and automated cross-browser testing is under the broader umbrella, and both have several sub-paths. Remote Testing of Websites provides additional details on the same topic. 

Our knowledge tells us that cross-browser testing tools hosted in the cloud are among the most effective of their kind. Cloud-based solutions don’t require the installation of any testing infrastructure, can be accessed from anywhere, and are easy to learn and use. 

9. Test For Interactive Experience

We’ve already established a wide range of screen sizes for mobile devices. There’s also the fact that the interactive experience has evolved since Steve Jobs unveiled the original iPhone. Some individuals today choose to use a stylus for a more consistent and accurate touch, while others prefer to use one hand exclusively for most interactions with the device. The primary goal of this responsive design testing checklist is to ensure a consistent user experience across devices and interaction types. 

You shouldn’t be able to press two buttons simultaneously with one hand on the same button. The user interface should attempt to consolidate the available choices by providing several different models, etc. The user’s impression of our site depends on this, so our responsive design testing checklist must remain a top priority.

10. Test the Mobile Compatibility of Website Pop-ups

Everybody is utilizing pop-ups because they are so effective at getting visitors to sign up for newsletters and buy products. However, you should be aware that website pop-up windows can be helpful and annoying. It can be highly irritating to site users and harmful to your site’s reputation with search engines if it is not presented correctly. 

You should also check if the website’s pop-ups are responsive—all pop-ups, whether online or in a new window, are included. Pop-ups should also be responsive to their purpose on any device and pass a responsive design test. 

11. Test for Better Functionality.

Check that your menu bars don’t spill off the sides of the screen. On mobile devices, tap the hamburger menu icon to access the site’s hidden navigation. Verify that swiping is an option for the user. 

Tools For Responsive Design Testing

It would help if you had a thorough testing strategy to ensure that your website works consistently across all platforms, browsers, and operating systems. Checking for user engagement, page loading, typefaces, graphics, navigations, alignments, etc., across several mobile devices would be a huge undertaking. Use a funnel template to monitor and group audience interaction with the website. 

However, several solutions on the market make it easy to check off every item on the responsive design testing checklist. For example, Testsigma is a responsive cloud-based automation tool that provides website and mobile app testing to increase speed and improve performance. The tool has many notable features, including automated maintenance, debugging, and instant reporting. If you want to test how responsive your website is, this is a great place to start. Some of it’s features are;

• Test planning, development and execution for multiple projects
• Multi-device testing of websites 
• Multiple testing use cases 
• Reporting and analytics
• Test data management
• AI test automation 
• Visual testing 

Check Out – Cross Website Tracking

Get here – the list of Responsive Web Design Testing Tools

Conclusion 

More than 8.5 billion mobile devices are currently in use worldwide; thus, your website must be optimized for mobile users. Every day, new gadgets, Operating systems, and browsers are released. However, testing a website’s responsive design is an ongoing process. Regular maintenance of the responsive design testing checklist is required.

To ensure your website is compatible with the latest devices and browsers, you should regularly update the list you test with. If you need inspiration for a new website and want to use responsive design, you can find examples of it all over the internet. 

Remember, too, that testing for responsive design is a continuous effort, not a one-and-done task. Each day brings a slew of new gadgets, so we must keep at it.