How to Test Your WordPress Site for Mobile Usability Problems?

This article deals with WordPress mobile usability problems.

Mobile users are quite uncertain, impatient, and difficult to target than desktop users. So, business owners must check the mobile usability problems before launching their website officially in the market.

We all know that mobile device penetration has been increasing enormously day-by-day. Some businesses and institutions are being run on mobile applications. I mean, we book a cab and groceries, everything online and through mobile apps nowadays.

In such a case, when the application or a site a user wishes to operate does no work properly, then he or she skips it to find the next best alternative within seconds online.

Therefore, this blog solely focuses on solving the various kinds of mobile usability problems which the business owners should pay attention to while scrolling down below.

These solutions will help gauge further extended and updated functionalities of a website.

The Basic Things Which Are Checked While Running The Website Tests Online Are:

• User Experience
The overall user experience can be checked while you use a mobile device or other tools or techniques mentioned below.

• Interaction
Interactive buttons and CTA or call to action buttons are also checked to see if they are visible and clickable.

• Animation and Other Buttons
If you have used any sort of media or animation on your website, it might be possible that the users from some devices are not able to see or play it. The same can also be detected once the tests are run or the website is run from different devices or operating systems.

• Graphics
Graphics might not be visible or have some issues on a few devices. It could be easily detected by using emulators or mobile devices.

• Text and content of the website
It might be possible that the content of the website is getting cut using a mobile phone. It does happen with some devices when the website is not compatible with those devices. Such mobile usability problems can be solved easily with the test runs.

• Loading time
Nobody likes to wait even a minute for the website to load. Using the fasted speed networks, people expect the website they choose to click to run within a fraction of second. Whereas if that does not happen, the lag drives your targeted audience away to the next best website.

So, the tools and techniques help in retaining the potential users of your website as well.

• No unnecessary advertisements
If you are running a site for your firm, you know the importance of advertisement more than anyone else currently. However, your site should have minimum pop-ups or ads, so it does not annoy the users away.
While you run the website compatibility tests for various mobile devices, it can be detected whether the audience is getting driven away because of such a problem.

• Another Usability
Lastly, running your website links from different devices can be helpful in cross-checking whether every function and page of the website is working or not.

Moving forward, we are going to discuss the various ways in which the usability issues can be detected or checked:

1) Testing Mobile Devices

You need to have different devices and operating systems at hand, like Android and iOS devices. At the moment, majorly, these two operating systems are dominating the market of the mobile industry.
Therefore, once you have some of the latest mobile phones, tablets, phablets, etc. at hand, you can run your WordPress website on them easily.
Things which are regularized and detected through mobile devices would be:
• Whether your website is working fine or not.
• If any error is displayed, specific to the device or not.
• Whether your WordPress website is loading on time or not.
• Whether your website is compatible with the latest operating systems and devices or not.
• Whether the icons, images, and other buttons visible or not across different screens of devices.
• If the users can fill up the contact, feedback, and any forms to get in touch with the website owners or not.

2) Browser Tools To Test The Mobile Website

MultiBrowser

It is one of the easy and fast mobile website emulators available on the browsers. It tackles a lot of mobile usability problems related to cross-browsers user experience. It has different sandboxed browsers wherein you can check from various screens how your website looks like to the reader, and you can also take real-time screenshots for further testing.

Browserling

In comparison to other emulator tools for the browsers to handle the day to day mobile usability problems, this one is creating a buzz amongst the amateur and inexperienced developers. Reason being that it allows developers a real-time experience of live browsers n virtual machines to test the reading of your website on the spot.
It also allows you to resize those browsers along with the resolution to test whether your website is looking the same from different perspectives and angles or not.

Toggling Device Embedded In Google Chrome

Chrome has a utility option for the modern-age developers to toggle between the mobile and browser view. You need to visit your page, click right and find the Inspect option from the menu button.
Therein, at the top left corner of the window, you will find the icon to toggle the device. In fact, to customize further and solve all your current mobile usability problems at hand, click the Responsive dropdown menu on the toolbar.

From the menu, you can choose the options of the latest devices, which are being used a lot currently by internet users. Doing so, you can toggle between the different views of your website and get the overall perspective of all the underlying issues related to user experience without much hassle.

Safari Browser Responsive Mode

If you are using the Safari browser, then it might be your lucky day to test your site’s user interface and experience for iPhone users. You just have to browse to Develop then click Enter Responsive Design Mode.
From then on, you will be given a range of latest iPhone and iPad devices to toggle the site’s view between. It helps you target your premium customers well as the iPhone is a style icon itself.

These Browser In-built Emulators Helpful For Mobile Usability Issues By Identifying:

• Icons/CTAs:

By browsing through different screens on your browser, you can view at once which mobile phone device is not conjuring up the proper layout of the CTA or clickable buttons. By detecting such defaults, you can further adjust the size or re-run the codes.

In the long run, it could save a larger number of sales orders because if the users are not able to find the icons clickable, they will simply move on to the next best option or change their mind to purchase something that you are offering.

• Content/ Database Forms:

Website owners like you are always interested in collecting the data about the customers. It helps to know what do the targeted customers want and how to deliver the same in the best possible way.
Moreover, the potential stakeholders can contact the developer or site owner directly by filling the basic contact information.

So, these emulators and add-ons discussed above are quite helpful in maintaining the point of contact, even if passive, smoother, and build a better and trustable relationship with the customers and clients.

• Speed Check:

Toggling between the screen, owners get to know how much time a particular device is taking to load even with the same bandwidth. This gives a better insight to know that the screen resolution or size might be the problem instead of blaming the internet connection.

3) Mobile Device Emulators

Emulators form a bridge between testing the mobile devices and using the browser emulators to get the perspective virtually of a mobile device’s usability without actually having used it.

iOS Emulator:

There are several iOS emulators available online like: Xcode, Appetize.io, Ripple, TestFlight, etc. Some of these emulators you can simply run on your desktop or some of them require to be downloaded extensively on a browser.
In layman’s terms, these emulators are similar to virtual machines where you can run the mobile phone applications and browsers to get the mobile experience.

Android Emulator:

Emulators like Remix OS Player, Bluestacks, Memu, Nox Player are one of the leading options for the website developers in 2019 to detect the common mobile usability problems.

The Remix OS Player runs the applications that are highly compatible with the Android 6.0 Marshmallow version. Memu runs the applications and other functions on your desktop devices for Android Jellybean and Lollipop compatibility tests.

On the other hand, Genymotion emulators work best for running tests on Android 4.4 to 7.0 version. However, users would need to enable the Visualization Technology from the BIOS and install VirtualBox simultaneously for this emulator to work without any immediate issues.

Basic Advantages Of These Emulators:

• Can work on multiple desktop devices can Mac, Linux, Windows, etc.
• Developers can choose which version of Android or iOS they want to run their application or mobile websites to test the targeted compatibility.

Related article: WordPress plugins for boosting mobile performance.