Over the past three weeks, we’ve talked about testing page load times, link functionality, and whether your site works on mobile devices. In this last post in the basic website management blog series, we’re going to cover functionality testing.

If important functions on your site don’t work, it doesn’t matter how well home improvement marketing and SEO is performing. All the traffic in the world won’t boost your revenue if shopping carts or quote buttons are broken.

What Functionality Should You Test?
You should ensure any functions on your site work, even if they aren’t required for a consumer to make a purchase or contact you for service. If you offer optional functions, such as blog posts with comment features, image galleries, or social share buttons, they need to work right. Otherwise, you frustrate users and increase the chance they leave your site and find what they need elsewhere.

It’s a good idea to run through your entire site, clicking and testing everything, at least once a year.

But you should test critical functionality more often. Critical functionality depends on your business needs and goals, but might include:

• Contact us forms, chats, and email. Make sure that whatever method the user selects, they can get in touch with your home improvement business with no hassle.
• Quote request forms. Go through the process of requesting a quote yourself periodically, and do so on different devices and browsers, to ensure there aren’t hiccups in the process that could cause a customer to abandon it.
• Shopping carts. If you sell window coverings or other items online, ensure shopping carts are easy to use and that they provide accurate information about shipping and taxes.
• Product pages. Click through your product pages if applicable and ensure items are appropriately named and categorized to make them easy to find and buy.
• CTA links. Whether it’s a link to find out more on a landing page or a buy now button on a product page, make sure all your CTA links work.

Make a list of the functions on your site someone might use to move forward in the buying process, and check those at least once a quarter. You should also test them each time a change is made to your website, even if it doesn’t seem related.

You don’t want to invest in home improvement SEO to drive traffic to your site only to find out that a blog update broke your link structure and people are bouncing because they can’t figure out how to ask for a quote.