Last Minute Web Testing Checklist for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the Holiday Season

It may seem like the Holiday season is a ways away, but time flies (doesn’t it feel like the year just started?). Your QA team has probably been preparing their web applications for the traffic of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the rest of the holiday season for some time now.

But if you’re scrambling to get everything done in time, are not totally sure everything that should be done, or just wanted to make sure you’re checking all the right boxes, we’ve put together a last-minute web testing checklist to ensure your site runs flawlessly. And to make sure you avoid the same fates of other companies’ bugs and crashes.

Prepare your site so you don’t lose customers when it matters most. With the help of SmartBear tools like CrossBrowserTesting, Alertsite, and LoadUI, you can be confident in your website 365 days a year.

Test Planning

• Run a risk analysis of your application to understand which pages receive the most traffic, as well as which are business critical
• Put a plan in place for in case your site experiences higher traffic than expected. Come up with a strategy for getting the website back up
• Consider creating a special error page so that customers are aware of the issue in case of downtime
• Use Google Analytics or Mixpanel to check which are the most popular browsers configurations your current audience is using.
• Check a site like Statcounter to evaluate which browsers, operating systems, and devices are the most popular overall

Functional Testing and Usability

• Check essential business functions such as login, product pages, add to cart, search and filtering capabilities, and navigation
• Test form fields and dropdowns and make sure the application responds correctly if something is not filled out. This may differ based on whether the field is optional or mandatory
• Test that product prices are correct and shipping charges are accurate. If these changes based on location, account for it in testing
• Make sure payment transactions are fully functional and can accept deals and promotions. Check algorithms, transaction, calculations; and ensure that it checkout works for all available forms of payment
• Perform negative testing to discover which user actions are most likely to break the application
• Test links to make sure none are broken
• Manually test a full workflow to analyze the usability and functionality of a complete buyer journey
• Use personas during exploratory testing to perform tests that account for different user journeys
• Functionally validate through Live Testing, Record & Replay, and/or Selenium Testing

Security Testing

• Perform penetration testing to check your application for weak spots that could compromise customer data
• Integrate security testing into your automation with open source tools like ZAP
• Ensure the encryption of passwords, payment information, and other sensitive data
• Implement multifactor authentication for increased security of your users

Browser & Mobile Testing

• Identify the most common and problematic browsers and operating systems for testing
• Test to make sure media such as sound, videos, and images are working correctly. If you have a dynamic web page, make sure it looks as intended on different browsers
• Identify which mobile devices you need to test on and assess responsive design
• Mobile devices suffer from more environmental factors than a typical desktop application. Determine how your site works on a device with a poor network connectivity or low battery
• Use real devices to get a feeling for the usability of your application on mobile

Visual Testing

• Visually validate your website with screenshot comparisons to evaluate at a pixel-level
• Take screenshots locally or behind a firewall using Local Tunnel to test visual elements before pages go to live to the public
• Go through your application Live Testing to evaluate visual efficiency over multi-step scenarios
• Make sure elements like buttons, images, and text are consistent across browsers
• Conduct visual regression testing to ensure the layout remains stable over new iterations

Test Automation

• Use test automation for regression testing to make sure functionalities remain stable through code changes
• Automate small, repetitive, and business-critical test cases at the UI level
• Analyze test results to identify where you have the most pertinent bottlenecks and commonly run into failures
• Automate your tests against real desktop and mobile browsers with Selenium. Take your scripts to the cloud with CrossBrowserTesting to acesss 1500+ browsers
• Leverage parallel testing to run automated tests across more browsers in less time

Load Testing and Monitoring

• Get an estimate of how many users you expect will be landing on your site at peak times
• Check site speed with performance and get response times for different connection speeds
• Use load testing to determine behavior under peak traffic loads
• Utilize pre-built load templates or customize your own to see how your website or API handles different traffic volumes
• Stress test to get a reading on what the maximum load is before your application is unresponsive or crashes
• Set up Uptime Monitoring to ensure you’re alerted immediately if your site crashes
• Begin monitoring the month before so you have a benchmark to alert against
• Enable testing and monitoring over complete user journeys and flows so customers don’t run into errors after venturing from the home page