A checklist for testing WordPress websites

This post was most recently updated on March 15th, 2016

It’s worth bearing in mind that testing a WordPress website does not mean testing every single piece of functionality. It is often assumed that, unless customizations have been made, that core functionality should work.

As an example, we wouldn’t normally test the full capability and functionality of a login screen, but we may check that any messages or design aspects are correctly implemented.

This is split in two sections, WordPress Design & Set Up and Problems To Look Out For. Checklists for testing purposes can’t be too specific as each website is different, but each section and bullet point should give you a good idea of what you may want to test or look out for.

WordPress Design & Set Up

WordPress Settings:

• Title
• Tagline
• Pagination
• Discussions/comments: Threaded Comments
• Discussions/comments: Multiple pages of comments
• Favicon

Homepage:

• How does the homepage function?
• Is it dynamic or static?
• Does content display correctly?
• Where do blog posts appear?
• What about page navigation?
• Are the images or media being pulled in correctly?

Search results:

• results display properly
• images appear correctly
• pagination appears correctly

General:

• No PHP warnings or notices
• No Javascript errors
• CSS standards
• Responsive Web
• Mobile compatibility
• Web standards
• Browser testing
• Theme Validation (e.g. http://wordpress.org/plugins/theme-check/)

Posts:

• Scheduled post
• Draft post
• Sticky post
• Links and read more links
• Test Gallery Images
• Images (linked) – displays correct and does not overflow content area
• Images (attached) – displays correct and does not overflow content area
• Videos – displays correct and does not overflow content area
• No content
• No or long title – observe layout and permalink
• Categories and tags – duplicate and high number of tags/categories should be accommodated

Protected Content with Password:

• Password form appears correctly
• Content is not displayed
• No comments displayed
• Entering correct password displays content

Content/pages/single posts:

• Navigation links
• Content: no content
• Styles: paragraphs, align (left, right, centre), headers (h1 – h6), block quotes, span/style/ascii characters, tables, lists (ordered, unordered and nested lists)
• Images: (un)captioned, alignment (left, right, centre), borders
• Images: wide image test – should be resized and not push sidebars to the bottom
• Images: thumbnails (regeneration) display correctly, within posts and as featured items
• Images: when image is linked or attached ensure correct display and no overflow of content.
• Gallery: images link to image post, images display correctly
• Videos: embed works, no content overlap
• Audio: ensure links to audio function
• Titles: how do really long titles look? How do really long non breaking strings look? Check for overflow issues.
• Titles: no title – post displays properly, ensure the link works ok
• Comments: displayed correctly, threaded comments, pagination, author comment, avatars, logged in/out users, edit link for admin users, html displays properly (links, quotes, etc)
• Comments: disabled – form does not display, ‘comments are disabled’ message displayed
• Trackbacks: display properly, check with multiple track backs.
• Pages: hierarchy
• Search results: results page display properly, the query is displayed
• Error pages: 404
• Menus: large number of categories/pages and also test for deep levels within the menus
• Widgets: display correctly (use large and small amounts of content)
• Format (Standard/Aside/Image/Link/Quote/Status) — for posts
• Template (Default / Other templates) — for pages
• Featured Images are displayed correctly

Problems To Look Out For

You’ll probably start to notice some patterns once you’ve worked on a few WordPress websites. Here we highlight some issues and recommendations from a testing perspective:

• Cross browser compatibility – it really is worth checking that it works on different browsers
• Updating WordPress – functionality and appearance often goes wonky after an upgrade, it is a good idea to test the website appearance AND functionality after each update. It’s also recommended to have stage/test environments to do this on!
• Security – WordPress is a popular target for spam and security hacks. I’m sure we don’t need to tell you to regularly back up your website. WordPress, Themes and Plugins need regular updating, whilst it is a positive sign that the landscape is always improving it can also be a bit of a pain to maintain and keep the errors and bugs away.
• Third Party Plugins – from experience they don’t always work, even more so after updates. It can be painful. Do your research before hand and do your own tests to ensure that at least the most common actions your users make still work.
• Social Media Integration: plugins and widgets display correctly with different types of content. It’s probably worth keeping an eye on these over time as social media platforms change frequently and may have an effect on how they work with WordPress websites or plugins.

Errors To Look Out For On A Regular Basis

• 500 Internal Server Errors – this could be a corrupt .htaaccess file or PHP memory limits.
• White Screen Of Death (just a blank page with nothing there!) – lots of reasons for this, but quite often it can be an incompatible plugin or theme
• Maintenance Error Mode – sometimes the website can get stuck in this mode as a result of not completing the process properly).
• Error Establishing A Database Connection – Database issues!
• Connection Timed Out – perhaps from an overloaded or badly configured server
• Error 145 – this means that the WP database is corrupt or damaged
• Error 28 – happens when the cache or server is full
• Warning: Cannot Modify Header Information – this is a result of extra white space in a file, normally wp-config.php