What is Local Page Testing and Why You Need it?

A report revealed that smartphone users worldwide account for over three billion and counting. That means, 63% of web traffic comes from mobile devices.

Responsive testing is crucial for every online business and testing a locally hosted website’s responsiveness is equally as important. If your web page or app is unresponsive, chances are that the bounce rates will be higher, and your website will not be considered user-friendly.

You will need to test new changes before publication. Questions may arise such as: How to check a website’s mobile view on the localhost? What is local page testing and how is responsiveness tested locally? These questions will be answered in this article.

Firstly, local testing is the ability to test local folders and internal or private servers. Private are mostly staging or internal servers that are a work in progress, and servers that have no public access.

How to Test Locally Hosted Websites?

There are some automated solutions and responsive local web design testing tools that are utilized to test locally hosted sites.

LT Browser

Across more than 50 mobile screens and resolutions, this browser can aid in testing the website’s responsiveness locally. Your site’s mobile version can be compared with a side-by-side view across numerous devices.

Minor action features are integrated to replicate and mimic actions on other devices that are performed on the primary device. LT browser has an in-built debugging feature. Project management tools like Trello, Asana, Jira, etc, enable sharing the testing reports with team members after marking any bugs.

Available Developer Tools in the Browser

Available in the browser’s developer tools is the Toggle device toolbar. This local responsive web design testing tool is easily accessible. Your locally hosted web pages can be checked if it is mobile-friendly across popular smartphones. This tool is found in Chrome and Firefox by pressing the F12 key on the keyboard.

Online tools such as LambdaTest Tunnel

With LambdaTest Tunnel you can:

1. Connect with Mac and Test Responsive Design Locally
2. Connect with Windows and Test Locally
3. Connect with Linux and Test Locally Hosted Websites

Testing the responsiveness of a locally hosted website is made easy across multiple operating systems and browsers with this tool as it provides additional functionalities and features that make it easy to locally test responsive web design.

Responsive Testing of Locally Hosted Websites: Advantages

Testing a  locally hosted website’s main goal is ensuring that the content of a website that a user is visiting renders in accordance with the screen size of a device. It also makes sure that a site quickly loads without any waiting time. Therefore, it is crucial to test responsive websites locally, here are the benefits that illustrate why.

• Improves Site Traffic: Half of a website’s traffic comes from mobile devices. Hence, across all platforms, maintaining a responsive website will help increase website traffic.

• Early Bug Detection: You can detect and catch bugs at an early stage by simply ensuring that the website has an efficient mobile view on localhost. You end up saving resources and time if bugs are caught at an early stage rather than when they are caught at a later stage, which would be too late.

• Reduced Bounce Rates: Responsive web design helps with user retention if a website’s mobile view looks and feels good and is user-friendly, bounce rates thereby decrease. It is a smart move to conduct responsive testing locally for customer acquisition and retention.

• Quick Page Loading: Naturally, users would expect a page to load within seconds especially with upgraded networks such as 3G and 4G, now even with 5G being accessible to most, this reflects drastically in how fast a page loads.

There are times when users will want to access your website while traveling, and there are chances of bad reception and network coverage, this could result in a long loading time for the website.

At all times, your website needs to be on the top of its game, performing exceptionally well. Here’s where testing responsiveness locally comes in handy so you can measure actual loading speeds instead of expected loading speeds.

• High Ranking on Search Engines: Ensuring a responsive design that is mobile-friendly locally will always keep you in Google SERP’s (search engine research page) good books, improving your website’s rank. A crucial factor in SEO is responsive design. Google ranks websites higher than others as it prefers responsive sites.

Some of the best tools to test locally hosted websites/apps:

1. Lambdatest
2. Browsershots
3. Browserstack
4. Test Complete
5. Cross-Browser Testing
6. TestingWhiz, to name a few

It is essential that an application or website is completely bug-free so as to increase customer satisfaction and user experience. If a website/application is free of errors, an impression of reliability and credibility is created among the users.