6 Easiest Ways To Emulate Mobile Devices For Website Testing
The act of evaluating websites or web apps across many mobile browsers is referred to as mobile website testing. It aids in the verification of a web app’s functionality and appearance across several mobile browsers such as Chrome, Safari, Opera, and others. The objective of this particular article is to demonstrate why mobile web testing is so important for organizations. It will then demonstrate three distinct approaches for doing mobile web testing.
What Are Mobile Web Apps?
Despite the fact that they are referred to as mobile web apps, they are not truly applications. They’re mobile-optimized web pages that seem like a smartphone app. Mobile web apps vary from native mobile applications in that they do not need your device to be downloaded. They are applications that may be accessed through a mobile browser or any other device that has an internet connection. A web application is not written in any mainstream programming language. JavaScript, CSS, and HTML5 are the most popular. They are simpler in terms of functionality and are easier to design and test than native mobile apps.
How Does Mobile Application Testing Work?
You must examine the quality of any product, digital or real, to ensure that the consumer’s experience is safe and flawless. Testing online apps is difficult since they must operate across a variety of browsers, browser versions, devices, and operating systems.
For example, a consumer may be using an older version of Safari on an iPhone 5 running iOS 12 to view your website. Alternatively, a user may be browsing your website on a Galaxy Note 20, which is connected to a 5G network and running the most recent version of Chrome and Android. There are tens of thousands of conceivable combinations, and it’s impossible to test them all.
- Using software to automate a physical device
Automating the testing of a real mobile device is likely the most difficult task, particularly if you operate in a big organization where bureaucratic hurdles abound and each action must be approved. Consider the case of a financial services tester who wants to automate testing on 12 genuine devices of various brands and models. She’s simultaneously testing Android and iOS (each with separate operating system versions) in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. To make matters even more complicated, she has to get USB access in order to connect the various devices to her desktop and automation system. And she only has access for two hours every week. She realizes that the mobile devices aren’t getting the signal in time once the automated tests are running in parallel, and all of the tests fail. When one test fails, all other tests fail as well. Because the actual device’s memory is limited, her gadgets also need a daily reset. Overall, she must devote a significant amount of time to maintaining the devices and conducting testing to verify that they are operational. As a consequence, test maintenance takes more time than automating would save her.
Building your own infrastructure to host all of these combinations is expensive and time-consuming, and manually testing is neither viable nor scalable. There are, however, other ways to test mobile web apps.
- Emulating The Devices
Offloading the responsibility of hosting test environments to companies like LambdaTest and employing an automation tool is an acceptable solution. You may use these tools to simulate genuine mobile devices and run concurrent tests on numerous combinations at the same time. This allows for a wider range of testing in a shorter length of time.
6 Easiest Ways To Emulate Mobile Devices For Website Testing
Following are the ways by which you can optimize testing website on mobile devices:
1. Make Easy Navigation A Top Priority
It is generally difficult to access, see, and utilize a website on a mobile device if it isn’t mobile-friendly. Visitors to your website may need to zoom in to view material or scroll endlessly to locate a button or link to click. Users are more likely to quit a website if they have a terrible online experience. Make sure that straightforward navigation is a priority on your website to avoid unwanted bounces. Increase the size of the buttons, text, and menu selections. If your touch screen navigation buttons are too wide, too tiny, or in the way of a finger attempting to scroll the page, you risk making an unintentional click.
2. Check To See If It’s Responsive
When a website is responsive, the user experience is improved; scrolling, panning, zooming, and, most importantly, confusion is reduced. Visitors to your website do not want to be perplexed when they arrive; a perplexed buyer does not act. Responsive design enhances the user experience for all visitors, regardless of the device they are using to access your site. A grid system is used in responsive design, which means the website is split into columns (usually 12) that are all the same width as the browser. The information inside this grid is fluid and flexible, and it may adjust and reorganize itself (move, stack, etc.) to match the screen size. Because the grid and information inside it can identify and “react” to the size of the screen on which it displays, the term “responsive” is employed. Hire a professional developer to construct your website or use a responsive platform like Squarespace to guarantee it is responsive.
3. Image Optimization
Make sure you only use high-quality photographs and graphics while working with images. Avoid utilizing photographs that are too tiny or of poor quality. Maintain consistency by ensuring that the alt text for pictures on both the mobile and desktop sites is the same. Rember that Alt-text is the text that is used to describe an image.
4. Don’t Block Javascript, CSS, Or Image Files, And Avoid Flash Entirely.
Without getting too technical, Javascript and CSS help Google to examine your website as if it were a viewer and then correctly index it for the best search results. If you prevent the Googlebot from accessing your site, it may result in poorer ranks and exposure. Avoid Flash since it isn’t supported by Android or iOS, so even if you use it, it won’t show up on mobile devices, resulting in an error message that says “Unplayable Content.” This kind of mistake is likely to perplex your audience and result in a less-than-satisfactory experience.
5. Use Simple Language
When it comes to mobile branding, go for shorter subject lines, lesser content, and huge CTA buttons (but not so big that they take up the entire mobile screen). With the development of smartphones, there’s a tendency toward material that’s simple to consume. Examine the present material on your website. Examine your website, blog, and email marketing strategies. Where can you reduce your message without losing its fundamental point? Culling should be done with purpose and as much strategy as feasible. Make sure to use the same clear headers on mobile as you use on the desktop when writing your content.
6. Use Only Standard Fonts
Standard fonts are significantly simpler to see on tiny screens; they’re also web-safe and HTML/CSS compliant. Many smartphones, such as Android and iOS, come preloaded with web-safe typefaces such as Open Sans, Lato, and Roboto. You must make sure your fonts are optimized for mobile—the ideal font size for body content on mobile is often 16px. On a phone, what seems to be a fair size on your desktop may look to be small, and tiny writing on a tiny gadget is a major eye strain. With media queries, you may alter font sizes on various displays. Because extremely ornamental script fonts are difficult to see on a tiny screen, it’s a good rule of thumb to avoid them. For a big body of text, choose a clean, straightforward serif typeface like Georgia or a popular sans-serif font like Roboto.
Advantages of Emulate Mobile Devices For Website Testing
- Allows teams to test and optimize their websites for a variety of mobile browsers, including Chrome, Safari, and Samsung Internet.
- Allows developers to test how a website looks on different mobile browsers running on different operating systems, such as Android and iOS. This ensures that the target device, browser, and operating system combination are all compatible.
- The overall user-friendliness of a website improves when it is optimized for mobile devices. It also helps in achieving greater search engine ranks, since Google considers mobile-friendliness ranking criteria. As a consequence, online pages are more visible.
- Mobile web testing, at its most basic level, aids in the development of websites that are both speedier and mobile-friendly. These sites provide enhanced user experiences on a variety of mobile devices.
Today, organizations have no option but to optimize their websites for mobile devices if they want to reach the widest audience possible. The strategies mentioned above will make it easier for developers and QAs to find faults in mobile versions of their websites. It will ensure that mobile websites are bug-free, that great user experiences are implemented, and that competitive advantage is maintained in an ever-changing sector.
Platforms like LambdaTest provide live testing of mobile apps on emulators and simulators and online real device cloud may be used to test your native mobile apps. You can then eliminate your in-house device lab to save money. Using LambdaTest’s Automation features, the test team may reduce overall build and execution times for UI-based tests. Make sure your website works on 3000+ genuine desktop and mobile browsers. The following functionalities are included in LT Browser: You may adjust the network speed and evaluate the website’s behaviour under various network circumstances, as well as conduct a performance report for your mobile website to uncover problems that are influencing its overall performance and rankings. Bug-logging with a single click, integration with your preferred project management tools, and collaboration with your team to get issues fixed quicker. Native developer tools are also available in the LT Browser, allowing you to easily solve the problem and confirm your modifications while on the road. You can also use touch mode, take full-page screenshots, film movies, and snap screenshots, among other things.
