Companies rely on their websites being up and running so customers—and potential customers—can easily access the information they need. But you can’t expect your IT team to be available to test and monitor your website 24/7. If a critical error occurs outside of working hours, there’s no way to quickly resolve the issue. That’s where robotic process automation (RPA) steps in.
With RPA, you can easily set up a website automation task that hands web testing over to powerful software robots. Giving your team peace of mind that your website is up and running smoothly. Here are 5 tips for automated website testing using web automation.
1. Set Up a Task for Automated Website Testing
The first step is to document the manual steps that users usually take in a step-by-step bullet list. Once you’ve broken down the steps, the work of automating your website testing can begin. An RPA solution should be simple and intuitive enough to mimic the steps of your workflow and set up a website automation task in minutes.
2. Monitor and Test Web Pages for Problems
Select which pages you want to have your task test and monitor on your website. These should include the most important pages to your company’s bottom line. For example, pages like the homepage, conversion pages, FAQ, and contact pages should be monitored to ensure they’re always accessible. Once you’ve determined the list, you can have your web automation task run every 10 minutes, 24/7 to test and monitor your key webpages.
3. Create Alerts for Key Stakeholders
Once your web automation task is set up, you need to determine what action should be taken if your website test runs into an error. When a critical error occurs or another issue is found by the software bots on one of your key webpages, a task can be triggered to send emails, text messages, or SLACK messages to your key stakeholders. This way the issue can be quickly resolved within minutes because it was automatically identified and the whole team was alerted.
4. Further Expand Your RPA Footprint
As task development progresses you can further expand by adding steps to the task to validate that you received all the correct data from the website, or that a file downloaded correctly. For example, a file might be given a unique name when it’s downloaded, and then the RPA task can run a file existence check or even scan the data in the file after it's been downloaded to ensure the data is correct.
5. Adapt for Other Critical Web Automation Tasks
With a flexible RPA solution, you can easily adapt and create workflows for other website automation tasks like those involving clicks or data extraction on web browsers. If you tried to create the same automation using a traditional scripting language, it would be complicated and take up more of your precious time. But with a comprehensive RPA solution, one with a simple, drag-and-drop automation interface, it’s easy to build and edit tasks and workflows as needed.
Want to see automated website testing in action?
See for yourself how RPA can streamline your website testing by scheduling a personal demonstration of Automate, the comprehensive RPA solution from Fortra. Our team of software experts would love to show you what Automate solutions can do.