Websites are an incredibly important component for modern businesses - small and large. For many of your customers, your website acts as their first impression, and you don’t want to have that impression spoiled by unprofessional-looking website bugs.

Today’s technologically savvy consumer has high expectations for company websites, and even a small error or inconsistency can result in potential clients taking their business elsewhere. A shoddy website isn’t the kind of reputation you want to be known for during these tough times.

But how does a regular person with no website development experience even begin to test for bugs? Well, you start by hunting down the most common website bugs that tend to affect sites.

What Are The Most Common Website Bugs?

Unfortunately, there isn’t some plug-and-play option for testing websites that lets you simply punch in your URL and spit out all the problems you need to fix. No single test method will alert you to all your website’s bugs. But there are a handful of common issues and tests that are a great place to get started.

Browser Compatibility Issues

Perhaps one of the most common issues that un-optimized websites suffer from is browser compatibility issues. There are a variety of browsers out in the world these days with a whole ocean of different devices and software versions in active use.

Even though your website code doesn’t change when your site is accessed on different browsers, the way it’s displayed can and often does. There is no magical solution that works every time. But thorough testing of your site across a wide variety of devices and web browsers is essential for ensuring all your users will have a good experience.

Compatibility testing can be performed using emulation services that create virtual environments for running applications or websites on a variety of different virtual devices. However, these services can be rather expensive and may also come with performance issues, making testing on them somewhat of a pain.

The best option is to have a dedicated device lab with a large selection of physical devices so you can see exactly what your users will see when they access your site from a similar device. This provides the best results but purchasing and maintaining a wide selection of devices isn’t the most cost-effective solution either.

Broken Links or Forms

Modern website designs have a ton of buttons, links, and forms. And any one of those buttons or links could be performing in an unexpected, unideal, or completely bonkers manner.

Having dead links that result in 404 errors or forms that don’t actually send the entered information anywhere meaningful is a big issue. It’s also another issue that can require a lot of grunt work to identify and resolve. There’s no telling which of the hundreds to thousands of buttons and links across your website might be misdirecting or leading to an outdated page, so you need to just click on everything to see if it works.

Some automated services crawl through your website, analyzing it for SEO issues like dead links. However, they won’t be able to detect non-assigned links that still lead to active pages. This means human error mistakes will still likely require human attention to uncover and resolve.

Slow Website Load Speeds

Something that can often be overlooked when people are testing their sites for usability, bugs, and general appeal is the performance of the site itself. If your website takes more than two or three seconds to load, it won’t matter how slick and modern your website’s design is-customers may click off of it in frustration.

As mentioned above, modern consumers have very high expectations for company websites. They need to be aesthetically pleasing, easy to use, and blazingly fast to maintain the attention of today’s instant gratification-seeking audiences.

One of the biggest culprits behind sluggish load times for websites is an overabundance of media components that aren’t sufficiently compressed. Uncompressed images and videos can have very large file sizes that take a long time (by modern standards) to load.

Compressing your files will help reduce load times, but more steps may be required to meaningfully impact your website’s poor performance. One solution is to use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) that stores your website’s assets on a cached server, helping speed up load times by cutting down on the calls your website makes to external servers.

As you can tell by now, finding bugs in a website and resolving them on your own is no mean feat. Depending on how much your company relies on its site for sales performance, you may need to hire a professional web developer to maintain and update your site regularly.

Hire a Professional Freelance Bug Tester

More affordable than salaried employees and ready with all the skills necessary to get straight to work, freelance website developers are available to tackle your website’s bugs, ensuring your site hits the ground running on day one.

Finding the right developer for your project isn’t always an easy task, but Upstack is here to help you find the talent you need. Get in touch with the experts at Upstack to find the right developer for your project.

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