The Essential Guide to Cross Browser Testing for Wix Websites

As an expert with over 10 years of experience testing websites and applications on thousands of browser and device combinations, I cannot stress enough the critical importance of performing comprehensive cross browser testing, especially for sites developed on platforms like Wix.

With Wix providing such an easy-to-use drag and drop site builder for over 200 million users across the globe, ensuring your website appears and operates flawlessly regardless of your visitor‘s browser is key to providing a quality experience as you grow your online presence.

This in-depth guide will walk you through all the crucial steps I‘ve found vital for effective cross browser testing during my career. I‘ll share key data-driven insights on the target browsers you need to test, tips for setting up your test environment, when to leverage test automation, how to catch and fix common cross browsing bugs, and more recommendations tailored specifically for validating Wix websites.

So let‘s get started on the essential checklist for Wix cross browser testing success!

Why Cross Browser Testing is Critical for Wix Sites

As your digital headquarters out on the open web, your Wix website needs to welcome your visitors smoothly regardless if they are accessing your site from an iPhone or iPad using Apple Safari, opening links from emails in Outlook and IE11 at work, browsing from a Windows laptop on the Firefox browser at home or a Chromebook using – you guessed it – Chrome OS and the Chrome browser.

With over 97% global market share combined, the browsers and devices highlighted below absolutely need verification testing to confirm your Wix site is bug-free across the most common user configurations:

Browser	Desktop Market Share	Mobile/Tablet Market Share
Chrome	65.19%	62.99%
Safari	18.77%	25.47%
Firefox	8.75%	3.40%
Edge	4.50%	N/A
Internet Explorer 11	1.11%	N/A

Global Desktop, Mobile & Tablet Browser Market Share, January 2023. Source: Statcounter

With a platform like Wix handling most of the heavy lifting on development, you might wonder why rigorous cross browser testing is needed. Won‘t Wix have already validated browser compatibility for you?

While Wix provides an excellent foundation, themes, plugins and custom site enhancements can still introduce problems like:

• Visual and layout inconsistencies
• App or extension functional issues
• Responsive design handling differences, especially on mobile
• Browser security policy conflicts
• Performance variations
• And more…

Thorough hands-on testing provides that validation across browsersand versions to help identify and resolve rendering, scripting, styling and functionality defects.

The goal of cross browser testing is delivering confidence your Wix site offers a seamless experience for all visitors, driving engagement, customer satisfaction and conversions regardless of device or browser preferences.

Crafting Your Cross Browser Test Plan

Now that we‘ve covered the key why for testing, let‘s outline the what and how in terms of an actionable test plan.

First, take inventory of the browsers and devices you and your team actively use in-house during development. While a great start, testing exclusively on your own machines is unlikely to cover the diversity of configurations your customers will utilize in the real world.

Expanding your test coverage requires access to more operating systems, browsers and devices. Budget permitting, investing in additional laptops, phones and tablets to build an in-house cross browser test lab is fantastic for manual testing needs.

For even wider device and browser access I highly recommend leveraging cloud testing solutions like BrowserStack. Their online cross browser compatibility testing tools provide instant access to 3000+ virtual browser and real mobile device combinations to supplement any physical machines.

With test environments established, the next factor is determining how much time to budget for manual testing versus test automation.

Balancing Manual QA and Test Automation

Automated testing delivers faster feedback cycles through scripted tests evaluating aspects like:

• Basic site functionality testing
• UI element presence validation
• Network request/response verification
• Overall performance metrics gathering

However, no automation script can fully replace manual testing techniques like:

• In-depth user workflow validation
• Visual/layout irregularity checks
• Responsiveness comparisons across devices
• Exploratory/ad hoc testing for discovery

I recommend a down-the-middle split between test automation and manual testing time/effort.

Manual testing efforts should focus on high priority flows and elements on your Wix site along with sampling across combinations of devices, browser versions and operating systems.

Any defects uncovered during manual tests can supplement automated checks to fill coverage gaps and serve as early warning indicators of potential cross browser pitfalls.

Let‘s break down some hands-on examples…

Manual Cross Browser Test Case Walkthrough

If we were testing a Wix e-commerce site, some manual test scenarios might include:

• Product category pages – Validate sorting, filtering and product details are fully functional across Windows and macOS using Chrome, Firefox and Edge. Check styling consistency. Confirm minimal horizontal scrolling on 13" laptop screens.

• Shopping cart – Test adding/updating/removing products in the cart across iPhone, Android phone and tablets. Checkout validation on Safari iOS, Chrome Android and Firefox Android.

• Account registration and management – Create, update and delete test user accounts on Chrome, Safari and Firefox phone/tablet mobile devices. Confirm account dashboard, order history and profile editing workflows behave as expected.

• Search – Verify search suggestions, results and filtering on a test product category across different Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge browser versions.

And so on for other key site pages and user interactions…

For Desktop browsers, make use of BrowserStack‘s Local Testing capabilities to access your locally running Wix site if required.

For mobile app testing, leveraging real iOS and Android devices is essential. BrowserStack provides instant access to thousands of real mobile devices for manual testing if you don‘t have sufficient in-house devices available.

Automated Cross Browser Testing example

While manual testing tackles user-centric scenarios, we can offload functional testing to automation by scripting test cases like:

• Site homepage load validation
• Testing forms functionality across browsers
• Confirming cookie acceptance banners appear as expected
• Verifying menu navigation workflows across resolutions
• Asserting successful third-party app/service integrations
• Benchmarking site performance metrics on different devices

Popular test automation frameworks like Selenium along with browser-specific ones like Playwright and Cypress can speed up testing when tailored to your needs.

For illustrative purposes, here is a simple Selenium script that searches a Wix site across 4 browsers, asserts page title text and takes screenshots if any failures occur during validation:

// Import Selenium browser instances
const browsers = [‘chrome‘,‘firefox‘,‘edge‘,‘safari‘]; 

beforeEach(async () => {

  // Open target browser
  await global[browser].goto(‘https://www.example.wixsite.com‘);

})

it(‘Can search site‘, async () => {

  // Get search box element and enter search term
  await global[browser].$(‘#search-box‘).setValue(‘testing‘);

  // Click search button
  await global[browser].$(‘[type="submit"]‘).click(); 

  // Assert browser title updated
  await global[browser].getTitle().should(‘include‘,‘Search Results for‘);

  // Catch failures  
  if(this.currentTest.state === ‘failed‘) {  
    await global[browser].takeScreenshot();  
  }

});

afterEach(async () => {

  // Close browser  
  await global[browser].close();

}) 

This script could then be executed in parallel across the 4000+ desktop and mobile browsers and devices available via BrowserStack to thoroughly test search functionality.

Debugging Common Cross Browser Defects

Now that we‘ve covered both manual and automated testing flows, let‘s dig deeper into some of the common pain points you may encounter with cross-Wix browser issues:

Visual and Layout Inconsistencies

Since Wix utilizes web standards like HTML and CSS, styling conflicts can still occur across varying browser renderings. Fonts not appearing correctly, changes in element positioning, overlapping dynamic components, unresponsive design handling problems and more can plague an otherwise perfectly good Wix site.

Carefully inspect pages across targeted browser and device combinations to catch any CSS issues early. Tools like Browsershots can assist with multi-browser comparisons. For deeper CSS debugging leverage browser DevTools options to validate styling via Pesticide mode, 3D transforms and more.

Functional and Performance Variation

Beyond cosmetic issues, more serious behavioral defects can emerge depending on browser choice:

• Form validation rules triggering incorrectly
• Platform security policies blocking features like webcam, geolocation etc
• JavaScript timing defects causing stalls
• Cache setting differences slowing page loads
• Outdated browsers choking on newer JavaScript/CSS standards

Closely monitor console logs for errors during testing. Profile site speed across combinations. Confirm resource loading doesn‘t stall across network conditions. Executing end-to-end user workflows can expose functionality gaps.

App and Extension Compatibility

The powerful site extendability of Wix with apps and extensions like forums, booking, surveys, messenger, etc can backfire with browser conflicts both visually and functionally.

Say a web form plugin over a gallery page overlays incorrectly on Safari mobile but looks fine on Chrome Android. Or a dynamic calculator works smoothly on Firefox but performs slowly on IE11. Misbehaving third-party add-ons can quickly ruin a good site.

Test integrated apps and extensions thoroughly across targeted browsers to avoid a Frankenstein collection of patchwork elements!

Best Practices for Wix Cross Browser Testing

Beyond fixing defects as they emerge, we can take proactive measures to mitigate issues down the line:

• Adhere to web standards – Utilize valid, semantic HTML5 markup without proprietary tags and attributes for wide browser recognition.

• Progressive enhancement first – Website core functionality should work without JavaScript enabled before adding JS-dependant enhancements.

• Feature detection over browser detection – Check for API/feature support capabilities rather than excluding based on browser brands that can fragment quickly.

• Performance budgeting – Set thresholds for site speed measurements during testing to maintain responsiveness.

• Plan a testing budget – Consider third-party software and professional testing services if in-house skills don‘t suffice.

• Document decisively – Log testing steps taken, coverage, environments, defects uncovered and fixes applied for ongoing improvement.

While cross browser testing requires diligence, putting in the effort upfront saves endless headaches down the road for both you and your customers as your Wix presence expands.

Let‘s Recap Key Takeaways

We‘ve covered a ton of ground when it comes to battle testing your Wix website across the most popular browsers and devices. Let‘s recap the key tips to takeaway:

• Know your browser market share – Tailor testing to browsers with significant usage like Chrome, Safari and Firefox.

• Mix manual and automated testing – Merge human insight with scripted efficiency.

• Uncover visual defects early – Fix CSS conflicts, layout issues and styling gaps.

• Validate third-party functions – Confirm all integrated apps and extensions work smoothly.

• Compare across environments – Leverage cloud testing services for additional test coverage.

• Budget time for testing – Don‘t cut this crucial step short before launch.

By following this Wix cross browser validation plan, you can feel rest assured your website offers a stellar experience for all visitors regardless of their browser preferences.

Happy testing! Please drop any questions below in the comments section.