Creating a website is not a really hard job. You can even create a website in less than 10 minutes with a CMS such as WordPress, Drupal or Joomla. A harder job than creating a website in the context of web development is maintaining a website. Website maintenance is a continuous job, which begins right after a website is created. You have a responsibility to ensure your website keeps running the way it should be. It is also your job to improve your site performance.
As a web developer or a person whose job is to maintain a website, you have at least the following tasks;
- Making sure your website works on any platform. Be it Windows, Linux, macOS, Android or iOS
- Making sure your website can be accessed via any web browser, no matter the version.
It looks trivial, but seriously, it’s not an easy job. An appropriate tool is needed in website maintenance or website testing. Comparium is a tool that you can use to test your website.
What is Comparium
Comparium is a tool that you can use to run automated testing, a technique of software testing that includes the following basic functions and test steps:
- Launch
- Initialization
- Execution
- Analysis
- The output of the result.
In the context of website development, running automated testing can help the overall performance of your website. You can, for instance, remove ineffective elements such as bad links, ads, buttons text, and so on.
With the help of Comparium, you can figure out if your website is running the way it should be on a web browser on a certain platform. For instance, you can figure out how your website looks like when being accessed with Firefox on Linux or Google Chrome on macOS. In other words, you can test your website on any browser and platform on a single PC.
How to use Comparium to test your website
Comparium is a new tool. The current version (version 1.0) of this tool allows you to run a cross-browser website testing. Not just for your own website, but also websites you developed for your clients. According to the descriptions on the Comparium website, the upcoming versions of this tool will support client Selenium scripts for testing different scenarios on a page and real-time web testing on a virtual desktop in any version of any browser.
To use of Comparium is pretty easy. You can simply visit its website and enter the URL of website you want to test. Specify the operating system(s) as well as the browser(s) you want to test your website on and click the TEST button.
Wait a moment until Comparium is done testing your website. You will then be provided the screenshots of your website on the web browsers on the platforms you specified above.
Important to note that the number you see on each screenshot is not your website score. It is the version of the web browser your website was tested on. Comparium is not the tool to check the page load speed. You can download the screenshots to check the look of your website on different browser versions on different platforms. If you see the same looks, this means there is no problem with your website.
In addition to the main page of your website, you can also use Comparium to test a specific page on your website, such as featured product page, contact page and so on. A cross-browser website testing tool like Comparium can be crucial if you are developing an e-commerce website as you can make sure your website can be accessed via a variety of web browsers on any device.
Unfortunately, Comparium has no feature yet to test a website on mobile platforms such as Android and iOS. However, it is an early stage for Comparium. This feature will be available on the next versions of Comparium.