Test drive your website

After designing and development of your website, you may want to test the site’s accessibility and loading speed. You do not need to be a professional designer or developer to test your site. Here is the simple way to test your site’s accessibility and loading speed.

Testing accessibility: Accessibility of your website is important not only from the business point of view but also from legal point of view. If you want to know why is it important from legal point of view just google “the target accessibility case”. I am not writing more details about this case to keep this blog brief.

To test your site’s accessibility, follow these steps:

1. Validate your site using W3 validator (  http://validator.w3.org )
2. Run function accessibility evaluator (http://fae.cita.uiuc.edu/ ). The result should be complete or almost complete.
3. Check for cross browser compatibility.

Testing speed:- To test the speed you need firefox browser with firebug add-on ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843/ ).

To test your site speed you can do either/both of the following.:

Google page speed

1. Download google page speed tool from http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/download.html
2. Open your website in firefox.
3. Open firebug console ( at the bottom of the page with some bug icon )
4. Click on page speed and then click on analyze performance.

YSow

1. Download Yahoo! Yslow add-on from http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/
2. Open your website in firefox.
3. Open firebug console.
4. Click on Yslow, select “smallsite or blog” from rulesets dropdown.
5. Click on run test.

It is  recommended that your page speed should be above 85 on Google page speed and YSlow. If not contact your developer/designer for improving your site’ performance.

If you are using Wordpress then I recommend using the WP Minify and WP Super cache plugins.

I will write about these plugins in my next blog post. Until then good luck with test driving your website.