Magento (Adobe Commerce)
Table of Contents
eCommerce website testing is a set of actions to confirm that the site looks and works as planned. If you want to squeeze the most out of your online store, you cannot do without this stage.
In this article, we discover functional testing tools and performance testing of Magento-based web stores.
The global ecommerce market continues to grow and expand. According to Statista, in 2020, retail ecommerce sales worldwide amounted to $4.28 trillion and this amount is predicted to grow to $5.4 trillion. Online shopping has become one of the most popular activities worldwide. Obviously, among the abundance of online stores, a sophisticated buyer will give preference to functional, convenient and stable.
The main difference between an online store and any other site lies in its goal: showing goods on a virtual storefront for users to buy them. But it is not enough just to sell the product – it is important to provide the buyer with positive emotions from the purchase. In practice, it is not always easy. The chances of missing a bug in the development stage are very high as a Magento developer needs to take into account many factors, from the future target audience to the subtle nuances of the correct web page organization.
So what is functional testing of an online store on the Magento platform? A testing approach should first of all assume:
In this article, our Magento developers and QA specialists discover what you need to pay attention to when testing online stores on CMS Magento.
At the stage of functional testing, it is necessary to check the implementation of the functional requirements according to the development specification. In addition to many features implemented in a particular store, the main user scenario is typical in any online store and includes the following steps:
It is also often expanded by registration and authorization.
To a large extent, the positive experience of the shopping process in an online store is facilitated by the obviousness of the “web pages behaviour”: it should not go beyond the usual scenario for the buyer, be intuitive and predictable. If the buyer cannot find the desired product or does not understand how to place an order, a bright design solution and page response speed will not save the store from losing a customer.
Below is the list of points to pay special attention to during functional testing:
Upon entering the site, the user should get a pleasant first impression and immediately understand which product is offered for purchase. It is important that at this stage the buyer can, if desired, obtain contact information about the seller, methods of payment and delivery. It is necessary to check the functioning of the elements, mainly located on the main page – the buyer encounters them immediately, and can leave the store if something does not work properly:
By the way, Magento CMS provides an opportunity to create several online stores at once. Then you can manage them from a common centre, one administrative panel. During functional testing, this feature must be taken into account.
After gaining a general idea of the store, the customer moves to the catalogue to view the products. The catalogue functions as a store navigator and includes categories and subcategories. The main and most important stages of verification:
If buyers are interested in any product from the catalogue, they go to the detailed page. This is an invariable attribute of an online store. It helps to provide all the necessary information about the product, describe it most attractively and is designed to help the buyer make a purchase decision.
The absence of particular elements will be inconvenient for the user to navigate among the products. These elements include:
The customer selects products and adds them to the shopping cart. At this stage of the online shopping process, the users not only collect information about the goods they like but also postpone them for further purchase decision making.
From a functional point of view, it is important first of all to check that:
When the goods are selected, a customer places an order. Registration in the system is often demanded at this stage. It is important to remember that the buyer should have an opportunity to select whether to place an order without registration or pre-register on the site.
For an online store, the registration process is extremely important: this is the formation of a customer base and the basis for analysis of the audience, as well as the collection of stat data, and much more. But registration should not be obligatory. It is better to tell on the store pages about the advantages of creating an account (tracking parcels, bonuses for regular customers, etc.).
What else do you need to consider when testing the checkout process? We suggest you consider the following:
Most large online stores have the functionality of a personal account. In the personal account, the user can manage the orders, receive information about individual offers, view the accumulated points for loyalty programs, etc.
In the personal account, test the following options:
Usually, online stores provide several payment options: cash on delivery, credit card, cashless payment from an account, etc. It all depends on the goals and capabilities of a particular online store.
Consider the following when testing payment options:
Magento’s strong point is its built-in support for currencies and exchange rates. For example, in a Magento store, you can use one currency to manage a store, and the site will display the price in a different currency. You can set up the system so that the customer of the store independently chooses a convenient currency. Currency rates can be managed in manual or automatic mode; different currencies can be used for different storefronts. All possible options should be tested.
Performance testing is a collection of testing types that aims to determine the health, stability, resource consumption, and other attributes of a website’s quality under a variety of use cases and workloads.
Various types of performance testing and performance testing tools allow specialists to find possible vulnerabilities and flaws in the system to prevent their detrimental effect on the web store operation in different use scenarios.
Below are 5 essential points deserving special attention during the performance testing of an ecommerce website.
TTFB (Time To First Byte) is the time until the first byte of the web page is received after the client sends a request. The lower this indicator, the faster the browser will start loading the page.
TTFB is one of the site loading metrics. According to Google’s recommendations, TTFB should not exceed 200ms, and ideally should be no more than 50ms. If the response time is longer, you will need to determine the cause and eliminate it.
Keep-Alive allows the user’s browser to download all necessary content (such as JavaScript, CSS, images, videos, etc.) over a persistent TCP connection, instead of making multiple requests for each file.
Enabling this option will help to enhance your web store’s speed and performance as your visitor’s browser can receive everything from a single, persistent HTTP connection.
Compression is a method of reducing a given amount of data. This allows a server to receive large amounts of data that take less time to transfer over the Internet because the compressed size is less than the normal size. Configuring compress transfer helps to enhance the use of bandwidth.
Images can make up over half of a web store content and they often become the biggest obstacle to optimal web page performance and a pleasant user experience.
When it comes to web performance, image compression is the key. Various image compression techniques offer a simple, cost-effective solution to quickly improve web performance without cutting down on graphics.
To optimize your ecommerce website, you can enable caching and compression options for static content in ISP manager. This will reduce overall server load and speed up page load times.
Continuous performance testing together with functional testing of ecommerce websites help to eliminate errors in their work in terms of functionality, convenience, performance and compatibility. This is a necessary minimum for the quality work of any web store.Magento ecommerce development opportunities are truly impressive. It is no exaggeration to say that you can create a store of any complexity on Magento, including functionality that will qualitatively distinguish it from competitors. If you already have an online store, our Magento agency can help you with any Magento web development issue you may have. Just contact us through the form on our website and let’s make your ecommerce website stand out from the competition.
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