Are you still restricting your test cases to only desktop platforms? This can be a very risky process as the total number of mobile users is rising massively. You can no longer wait to invest in mobile-friendly tests to ensure proper compatibility and user experience on these portable devices as well.
Want an eye-opener? Half of the total internet users come from all forms of mobile devices. A responsive design practice, along with mobile friendliness, ensures that you are investing in user retention, conversion, and search visibility.
Unfamiliar with responsive design? Don’t worry! We are here for you. Our article will help you discover Mobile Friendly Test: 8 Tools For Responsive Design.
What Is Mobile-Friendly Testing
Since we are aiming this article for the newcomers to this industry, it is only justified that we begin our discussion with the basics of what is mobile-friendly testing. It is the process of ensuring that your application is functional and usable on all mobile devices.
But you may now ask that why is it important to implement mobile-friendly testing. To justify this option, let us go through the following:
- The first thing that you must understand is the impact of mobile friendliness. Google now prioritizes mobile-first indexing, thanks to its algorithm changes. This means that if your application is designed for mobile devices, there’s a very high probability that it will be positively ranked in all Google search results.
- By implementing mobile-friendly testing, you are giving the best experience to your customers. This is because unfriendly layouts can cause users to abandon your website quickly. Want another fact? These users will never return to your application ever again. This clearly shows the role of mobile-friendly testing in not only reducing the bounce rates but also increasing the user retention rates.
- If you provide a smooth experience to your mobile users, you are increasing the probability of them interacting with your application. This can include various forms of actions like signing up on the app, making a purchase, or directly contacting you for any form of leads.
- Finally, you must remember that maintaining proper experience on an application on multiple platforms is one of the core pillars of building brand credibility. In other words, a mobile-optimized site will create trust and professionalism, which is very important to build a positive brand image.
Best Responsive Design Testing Apps
Let us now divert our attention towards some of the best responsive design testing apps that are currently available in the market. While creating this list, we took special attention to include all the popularly used apps that can cover all the use cases that are currently in practice:
LambaTest
LambdaTest is an AI-native test orchestration and execution platform that lets you perform manual and automation testing at scale with over 3000+ browsers, OS combinations, and 5000+ real devices.
If you are trying to use LambdaTest to perform responsive testing, you must be aware that although it requires a subscription to access its cloud platform, you can use the responsive checker completely for free. This tool will be an excellent option to perform visual layout validation on multiple devices accessible through the device farm of LambdaTest.
You can also integrate LambdaTest with cloud platforms like Selenium and Appium to perform Selenium mobile testing and verify the cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility of your applications. Curious to perform this process? The following code snippet will help you perform Selenium mobile testing with LambdaTest:
Google Mobile-Friendly Test
This is the mobile-friendly testing tool that is natively developed by Google. It is only obvious that it is a very fast, reliable, and no-cost way to verify the responsiveness of your mobile applications. To ensure the tests are accurate, it uses Google’s own real-world Google bot metrics.
Some of the major features of this tool include:
- The ability to test a live URL or a RAW HTML code, depending on the requirements of the application that you’re currently working on.
- You can automatically detect text size, tap targets, and viewpoint settings to ensure that it is verifying the functioning of all the interactive elements present on the application.
- This tool will also help you to highlight the loading and rendering issues that might be present in the core infrastructure of your mobile application.
- Since it is natively developed by Google, it can directly link to the Google Search Console to provide you with deeper SEO insights. This would be a very important approach to improve the search optimization of your app.
Still skeptical about using it? You must remember that it will be the first line of defense for anyone who is concerned about Google search rankings and the mobile user experience.
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Chrome DevTools Device Mode
The Chrome DevTools is the most easily available and yet one of the most effective ways of verifying the mobile responsiveness of your application. It has a powerful and built-in testing mode that can emulate multiple device types and behaviors directly within your browser window.
Let us now divert our attention to some of the major features that will be available to you while using Chrome DevTools mobile device mode:
- It can help you simulate various screen sizes and pixel densities to further improve the dependability of the mobile emulation processes.
- With Chrome DevTools, you can emulate touch interactions and orientation changes to further ensure that the user gets a stable experience irrespective of their preferences.
- It can help you throttle the mobile network and CPU availability to replicate real-world mobile conditions and further guarantee the stability of the application architecture.
- With Chrome DevTools, you can also test and debug the layout issues in real-time to ensure reduced development and testing periods.
In short, you must consider this option as a must-have to implement pixel-perfect device emulation during live site edits.
Responsively
Responsibly is an open-source desktop application that displays your website simultaneously on multiple device frames, that too in real-time. With this tool, you can understand how various elements present on the interface can impact the rendering of the application.
While using this tool, you will have access to the following features:
- It helps to implement synchronized scrolling and interactions to replicate all forms of user interactions on the mobile application.
- With Responsibly, you can implement side-by-side rendering of custom and predefined device breakpoints to understand the stability of the core infrastructure in the application.
- It also helps implement hot reloading for faster deployment and rendering across multiple device interfaces.
- Finally, it will also capture full-page screenshots across multiple views to keep records of all the solutions and visual elements. This will help you in simplifying the debugging process, which will follow soon after.
This tool will be the perfect option for front-end developers and user experience engineers who want to implement an instant multi-instance visual comparison without switching through multiple tabs.
GTMetrix
GT Metrix is one of the most popular tools for performance testing, but it also has mobile emulation options. These options will reveal how speed and responsiveness can affect the mobile users on your application. To implement this process, it provides access to the following features:
- It can simulate the Android Chrome experience, along with the ability to test over multiple network connections and location settings.
- It also allows access to core web vitals and page load waterfalls to implement real-time data debugging. It also has various advanced features like auditing, lazy loading, critical path rendering, and CSS issues.
This will be the perfect option for you if you want to implement performance-focused test cases to optimize load times and also reduce the mobile bounce rates on your application.
Screenfly By BlueTree
This is a free browser-based emulator which offers a simple and quick way to test the website on multiple devices and resolutions. Want to learn more? Let us go through the main features of it:
- It helps simulate smartphones, tablets, laptops, and TVs across a single browser window to provide a unified testing experience.
- It also helps you to rotate the screen to test landscape and portrait mode at the same time, to further improve the inclusivity of the test cases.
- With this tool, you also have the option to add custom resolutions and save presets for future testing.
- The final advantage is that you can work with this tool without registration or installation to reduce the learning curve and also the setup process.
It is the perfect option for you if you’re looking for a lightweight and super convenient way to test both client and non-technical aspects of your application.
Sizzy
This is a premium developer-centric browser which is mainly designed to test websites on multiple devices at the same time.
It offers various features like:
- Real-time synchronization and interaction across devices, along with a built-in browser for development and responsive testing.
- A detailed console window for debugging across multiple devices, along with previews of dozens of devices in one window.
This will be a perfect option if you work in an agency or a design studio which requires real-time rendering previews on mobile devices.
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Percy
Percy is a visual testing tool which is mainly focused on automated screenshots and design consistency. Although it does not offer live device testing capabilities, it has the following features:
- You can easily integrate this tool with GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket.
- It provides options to implement automated visual regression testing during the pull request, along with side-by-side comparison of visual changes.
- It also works across responsive breakpoints to further improve the scalability of the test cases.
- It is the perfect option if you’re looking for a continuous integration and continuous deployment capable tool that focuses on design integrity across device updates.
The Bottom Line
Based on everything that we’ve discussed in this article, we can easily say that mobile responsiveness is all about creating a functional, fast, and frictionless experience that provides the best user experience along with search engine standards. If you choose the right tool that matches your requirements and preferences from the list that we’ve given above, you’ll be able to implement quicker diagnostics and visual feedbacks to perform visual audits and performance debugging.
Apart from creating a mobile-friendly test, you should also focus on keeping yourself updated with all the upcoming trends and innovations for mobile app development. This approach will ensure that you are quickly adding all the upcoming trends and innovations to provide the best experience to your customers.
