Currently, testing tools for eCommerce have become essential. As the owner or manager of an online store, you know the challenge of creating and maintaining a good user experience that ultimately translates into more sales.
For instance, website loading speed is a critical factor in eCommerce. According to this report, 40% of surveyed users stated that they would abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Considering this, a one-second delay in site response can result in a 7% loss in conversions and an 11% decrease in website visits. For a retail business earning $200,000 per day, that one-second delay could lead to a $5 million loss in annual sales.
Reducing the load time of your eCommerce site can have a drastic impact on overall business success. Therefore, it's important to ensure you optimize the performance of your online store.
However, before making your eCommerce site lightning-fast, you should measure the current performance of your store. To do this, there is a wide variety of testing tools for eCommerce that help ensure everything runs smoothly. In this article, we have compiled a list of 7 testing tools for eCommerce that can help measure all aspects of your online store's performance. Let's get started!
But first...
The loading speed of your eCommerce site is not the only thing that matters.
The loading time of your eCommerce site is one of the web performance metrics that can be measured. It defines the time it takes for a site to fully load in the user's browser. The website speed is an indicator of the success of your online store, as it affects its conversion rate, revenue, traffic, page views, and overall reputation. The faster it loads, the better position you will be in with your customers.
However, speed is just one of the factors for this success. Good quality and performance of the online store should also consider:
- Accessibility: This metric measures how easy it is to navigate through the website, especially for people with disabilities or special needs. A high Accessibility score means that your online store has taken the necessary steps to be visually, audibly, and physically accessible 👁️. This includes offering alternative payment methods 💳 and providing clear and detailed information about products 🛍️. The key here is to make your online store fully accessible to all users. The more people can access it, the more potential business you could receive.
- SEO: A highly important metric that measures whether the website is optimized for search engine rankings. A high SEO score positively influences your ranking in search engine results for users. A low score means poor ranking, low visibility, and ultimately, fewer conversion opportunities.
- Best Practices: This metric measures if the website adheres to modern web development standards by analyzing the code's health. A high score in the Best Practices aspect means that your website follows established best practices for web development, including the use of secure connections (HTTPS) to help prevent security vulnerabilities.
- Progressive Web Application or PWA: This element measures if your website utilizes modern web capabilities to provide an optimal user experience. A high PWA score means that your eCommerce site is optimized for the mobile user experience. After all, we know how important mobile commerce is right now. A 2023 study on the eCommerce industry in Spain shows that the preference for mobile devices for online shopping has significantly increased year after year, reaching 46.26% of all online users.
- Performance: And finally, web performance. This metric measures the speed at which an eCommerce website loads and how quickly users can interact with it.
As you can see, there are several aspects that can be evaluated when testing the performance of a website and how it contributes to achieving your digital business goals. Therefore, we should not only focus on speed but also seek a comprehensive and complete evaluation of our online store.
What types of tests can we perform on an eCommerce site?
There are several types of performance tests for eCommerce that measure various aspects of your site's functionality. These can include:
Functional Testing:
eCommerce sites tend to have more functionalities than other types of sites. Meticulous testing of features such as login/logout, filtering, payments, search, and other essential aspects of an online store can ultimately determine whether a first-time visitor becomes a loyal customer.
Security Testing:
Customers need to feel confident that their personal and financial data is safe from unauthorized exposure, and that their transactions will not result in financial loss. Security testing for eCommerce involves verifying payment gateways, checking for SQL injection vulnerabilities, and conducting ethical hacking to test login/registration functions.
Performance Testing:
Application performance and eCommerce site performance testing ensure minimal loading times. This is where the loading speed of your site is tested, including data transfer rate, database performance, traffic load tolerance, and overall system performance.
Compatibility Testing:
When building your online store, you need to ensure that customers can access it through any web browser. Tools like Browsershots, Browsestack, and CrossBrowserTesting are commonly used to verify that your site functions properly across different browsers. Another important aspect of compatibility testing is ensuring your site works well on mobile devices, as mobile transactions are becoming increasingly popular.
Usability Testing:
The success of your eCommerce site heavily relies on how well users can navigate it (known as user experience or UX). Along with user-friendly navigation, UX encompasses aspects such as a seamless purchasing and payment process, simple filtering, clear content, convenient shopping cart functionality, and other design and operational details that ensure a smooth interaction with your online store.
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Keep in mind: any of these types of tests can be implemented manually or through automation. While automated testing for an eCommerce website is certainly faster, it may not always be the best option. For example, initiating automated functional tests for eCommerce websites may not yield accurate results as these sites have many dynamic elements (product inventory, coupons, special offers) that tend to change frequently. In such cases, the best approach would be to include manual testing in addition to automated testing.
7 eCommerce testing tools that will help improve the performance of your online store
Below you will find a list of seven free tools to help you test how well your online store performs and identify key performance issues.
Valido App
It is a specialized testing solution for eCommerce sites. You will be able to audit your online store, monitor its Web Score (all critical web performance metrics), get AI-powered solutions to identified issues, and compare your site against specified competitors. Additionally, you can conduct multi-brand tests in different geographical locations and on various mobile devices. All of this can be consumed through visual dashboards that present the information in a comprehensible manner. You don't need technical skills to use Valido App with your online store and set up any type of test you want.
Price: Free.
Includes the option to upgrade to paid plans.
Google PageSpeed Insights
This is Google's classic tool for measuring web performance. One of its benefits is that it not only provides a detailed description of how fast your site loads but also offers recommendations to make the page faster. The optimization suggestions are based on general web performance metrics, including resource caching, data loading, and download size.
Price: Free.
Pingdom Tools
Pingdom's Page Speed tool is another free online alternative you can use to test the loading time of your eCommerce site. It is similar to the Google tool as it also provides best practices you can follow to improve the speed and status of your website. The reports provided by Pingdom include a waterfall breakdown, a performance grade, an overall page analysis, and performance history tracking.
Price: Pricing starts at $15/month.
A free 30-day trial is available.
YSlow
The tool can be integrated as a browser extension. YSlow analysis is based on the 23 rules from Yahoo! that form a matrix for website performance.
YSlow analyzes web pages, displays statistics about page load time, and provides suggestions for improvement. The YSlow interface appears at the bottom of the page. The performance of your eCommerce site ranges from 0 to 100.
Price: Free.
GTMetrix
It is a free website testing tool that shows how fast your eCommerce site loads and provides detailed insights into what makes your site load slowly. The major benefit of this tool is that it analyzes your web performance using both PageSpeed and YSlow. The results are color-coded for easy understanding. The overall results display the performance score, full load time, page size, and the number of requests. Like other tools, it offers suggestions on how to optimize your eCommerce site.
Price: You can choose between a free version or one of the GTMetrix PRO subscriptions: Basic - Free; Solo - $10.65/month; Starter - $21.25/month; Growth - $42.50/month.
Dareboost
It is an all-in-one tool for managing the speed of any website. Real Browser Testing allows you to perform highly configurable and realistic tests that are reproduced very quickly. Unlike other speed testing and web performance tools, Dareboost offers metrics directly related to UX. For example, this tool provides a video analysis that can be very useful for checking what your customer experiences as your website loads.
Price: It offers various plans: Discover - $59/month; Explore - $370/month; Enterprise - request a quote.
WebPageTest
With this tool, you can perform both simple and advanced website speed tests. The rating system ranges from F to A based on various performance aspects such as time to first byte (TTFB), compression transfer, static cache content, image compression, and effective use of CDN. It is possible to run tests for different geographic locations and devices.
Price: Free.
Now is your turn!
All the metrics that measure the performance of an ecommerce website are crucial in providing an excellent user experience. Therefore, you must take the necessary steps to ensure that your online store has a high Web Score. In this article, we have mentioned specialized tools as well as general ones to help you test the performance and start an improvement plan to address any issues.
If you aspire to create a great ecommerce site, don't forget to conduct comprehensive tests. This way, you ensure a pleasant experience for the customer, which will ultimately translate into increased revenue and a strong brand reputation for your online store in the years to come.
Are you in need of conducting tests on your ecommerce website? Contact us today here to learn how we can assist you.
Digital Marketing Manager at Orienteed.
