Easy Browser Testing - what does your site really look like to visitors?

So you've made some changes to your website but want to see whether they render properly in popular browsers. How do you do it?

You can install the major browsers and try it yourself or you can use a tool like Browsershots which is a free online service that displays screenshots of how your website looks for different website visitors.

Here's an example screen shot from browsershots. You can select the screenshots to drill down or download them all to examine later.

Browsershots allows you to do browser testing by selecting:

the operating system
the browser (and it covers some niche browsers and also different versions of popularly used browsers)
the screen size
the number of colours
whether Java or Javascript is enabled/disabled on the browser
what Flash version is installed on the browser

You can select all options to test however that will take a long time. Do you need to test all these options? Well not really, have a look at what most of your visitors use in a tool like Google Analytics. Chances are their profile will look something like ours:

the operating system - PC, Mac
the browser (and it covers some niche browsers and also different versions of popularly used browsers) - IE, Firefox, Safari
the screen size - mostly large screen ie 1024x768 and over
the number of colours - 24bit and greater
whether Javascript is enabled/disabled on the browser - enabled
what Flash version is installed on the browser - v9 or v10

What to look out for:

misplaced text, tables or graphics
text that overwrites existing text
suboptimal layout - eg your main call to action on the page is below the fold (not on the screen that displays)
anything that offends your design principles

I suggest you use a service lke Browsershots whenever you redo your website in a significant way. When making small changes you might want to at least test your website on several browsers (eg Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari).

PS. If you do use Analytics you might want to study it briefly. Here are a few little things I noticed: Chrome visitors are the most likely to convert, followed by Firefox and IE). So perhaps I should focus more on the best customers (or maybe try to work harder on those not converting as well). You will need to decide what your approach is.

There is also an interesting tab in Analytics that lets you see the most frequently used combination of browser and operating system. The most popular is not surprisingly IE and Windows. For us number 6 was Safari and iPhone. So perhaps you also need to consider how your website renders on PDAs!