Improve and Maintain Your Website Quality
What is website quality assurance?
| Website quality assurance (QA) is the process of maintaining the quality of a website and all its pages to prevent navigational, comprehension, visual, and usability barriers. |
Website QA has a focus on content. It includes monitoring and fixing content errors such as spelling errors, fixing broken links and broken images, providing easy to understand content with an appropriate readability level, and keeping user experience in mind.
Benefits of website quality assurance
Website reflects and reinforces your brand. The more errors your website has, the more they can tarnish your brand. Error-free and readable content shows that you care about your users and reinforces your brand positively.
Users have a positive experience when using your site. If your site is full of broken links or misspellings and has hard-to-read content, users can form a negative view of your brand, can leave your website quickly, and are less likely to return. When you have error-free and readable content appropriate for your audience, users will have a more positive experience resulting in more time spent on your website and increased conversions.
Search engine optimization (SEO) improves. When your website has error-free and readable content, search bots are more likely to recognize it as a credible, quality website offering relevant information which will improve your search rankings. A positive user experience will also benefit SEO by reducing bounce rates and increasing conversions.
Content and design consistency across browsers and devices. When taking on QA, you will also work with how your content is displayed across browsers and devices. The way you show your content is just as important as the content itself.
How to create a website quality assurance plan
- Write down your current method and resources (including staff, budgets, and tools) for maintaining the quality of the website.
- Audit and investigate how your website is currently performing and make notes of the elements on your website that need to be fixed. Scan for content errors such as broken links, broken images, spelling mistakes, and readability levels as well as SEO mistakes and accessibility errors that affect usability and bounce rates.
- Identify what errors need to be fixed first. Identify the most important issues by page views and importance (for example, the homepage, footer, or contact us would be a high priority).
- Create a plan for who and when you will work on fixing current issues and maintaining the quality of the website.
- Investigate website quality assurance tools, such as Acquia Optimize, that can automate the process.
Elements to include in a website quality assurance audit
During your website quality assurance audit, look for content errors such as broken links, broken images, spelling errors, and readability levels as well as SEO and accessibility errors. Consider these questions you should ask and problems you should look out for during a website redesign or refresh.
Spelling Errors
Misspellings are embarrassing but almost unavoidable. Spelling errors can: lead to misinterpretation of your message, imply you lack care, tarnish your brand’s credibility and reliability, and ultimately result in lost revenue. The thing about misspellings is that we know that it will almost always happen because it’s simply not humanly possible to catch every mistake by eye.
There are a number of tips and tools to help us catch these little mistakes; document spell checkers, Grammarly, and content management systems. But these aren’t primed to catch things like potential misspellings and often confuse things like acronyms and industry terms as typos.
Tips for catching misspellings when you write content:
- Take a Break
- Always Proofread
- Don’t Rely on Spell Check Tools Alone
- Read Your Content Out Loud
- Double Check Names and Terminology
- Get a Second Pair of Eyes
Broken Links
Having broken links on your site is one of the worst errors you can have and can increase your site’s bounce rates. Think about it; landing on a 404 page can be like hitting a dead-end for most users which breaks their navigational flow, causes frustration, and will likely lead them to abandon their tasks on your site.
Learn how to find and fix broken links.
Readability Level
Readability scores are measurements of how your content may be understood by your intended audience. People read differently online and skim more than focusing on the details. It takes a little less than five seconds for them to decide if the content on your site is worth their time. By investigating your site’s readability levels and adjusting them to be appropriate for your audience, your users can enjoy and understand your content more.
Consider these content readability elements:
- Sentence length
- Paragraph length
- Vocabulary and Voice
- Scanability
Consider these visual display readability elements:
- Fonts
- Text emphasis
- Text effects
- Reading path
- Headings
SEO
SEO should also be considered in website QA. Well-written, properly structured, and error-free content positively affects usability and reduces bounce rates.
What to consider when assessing a web page for SEO:
- Meta tags
- URLs
- Headers
- Images
- Links
- Content
- Navigation
- Social media links
- Loading speed
- Mobile-friendly views
Web Accessibility
Web accessibility is the need for websites to utilize tools and technologies developed to aid the perception, understanding, contribution, navigation, and interaction of a person with a disability on the site. The four principles of web accessibility are the foundations of content produced for the web and for anyone who wants to use the web. They outline that web content needs to be: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.
Although web accessibility is usually dealt with on a separate journey, there are many overlaps with QA. Content is a large part of both web accessibility and QA. Dealing with spelling errors, broken links, readability, and SEO, will all positively benefit your web accessibility levels.
Integrating web accessibility can seem intimidating to those that are just getting acquainted with it, but it is a vital element of user experience.
Learn about why web accessibility is important, how to create an accessibility strategy, and more in our free Accessibility Handbook.
Learn more about website quality assurance factors.
The quickest ways to improve website quality assurance
But doesn’t QA testing take time, especially if I have a large site? I hear you ask. In a technical sense, it does, but there are also tools that can help make the process easier, without a designated QA tester.
Solutions like Acquia Optimize automate the data collection and analysis process, scan your site both weekly and on-demand, and provide you with a comprehensive report on any issues detected. Having this functionality helps eliminate any instances of human error or oversight and makes the process much more efficient. Investing in a tool like Acquia Optimize is worth it when you think about the time and effort it takes to check every single page on your site manually.
Make the most of our free website scan so you can see where errors are and accelerate your website quality assurance.
Digital Marketing Manager
