You think your website looks perfectly tailored on your computer? Feeling happy about its design? Well, you should! But you should also consider that you are not the target audience of your own website! Your target audience are the Internet users at large and these users use a wide variety of devices (including desktop, laptop, tablets and mobile phones). All these devices have different screen sizes and resolutions. Therefore, it is highly recommended that you test your website not only on your computer, but also on as many different devices as possible (e.g. iPad, iPhone, Kindle, laptops, desktops etc.)
The question is, would you need to buy all these tablet and laptop devices? Thankfully, the answer is NO!
Good news is that now you can test your website online to check how it would look on difference screen sizes. There are a number of free online services available for this purpose. Before we take a look at these services, let me tell you that nowadays it is very important that your website has a responsive design. If your website is responsive, only then it will be able to adjust itself according to various mobile/stationary devices.
READ ALSO: What is a responsive website?
Why responsive design is important? Well, just to give you an idea, TechWelkin gets it’s 40% traffic from mobile devices. If your website is not responsive, it is actually losing 30% to 40% traffic. I designed TechWelkin on Genesis Framework and ensured that it is easily readable on all the devices. Google also gives more importance to websites that are responsive in nature. Professional bloggers, who write blogs to earn money using ad networks like Google AdSense also notice that having a responsive website increases their income. It is simply because they get more traffic (especially through mobile devices).
The first such service that we recommend is Quirk Tools. Go to this page, enter URL of your website and it will show how your website will display on a particular device. From the menu, you can select a number of brands of desktop, laptop, tablet, TV, Kindle and mobile phone devices. If you want to test for a custom screen size –you can do that as well.
While testing, it is recommended that you also use screen rotation feature to view the website in landscape (horizontal) orientation. In addition, you’ve options to use a proxy server to load the required website into various screens. Using proxy server is essential for testing websites that use header options to avoid embedding in IFRAME.
A responsive design test tool developed by Matt Kersley is available at: http://mattkersley.com/responsive
This tool is much simpler and loads the given website in several sizes at once. Unlike Quirk Tools, this service tests the website only for certain predefined screen sizes (like that of iPhone, small tablet, small phone, iPad landscape mode and iPad portrait mode)
Responsinator.com website also works in same way as Matt Kersley’s tool –although it has slightly larger number of screen sizes available. Apart from iPad, iPhone this service also tests your website for Amazon Kindle.
After using the above mentioned three online services to test techwelkin.com –I have concluded that Quirk Tools is the best online service available for responsive design testing. It provides many more features than simplistic pages developed by from Matt Kirsley and Responsinator.
I hope this was useful for you. Please feel free to ask if you have any questions on this topic. I will be happy to try and help you. Thank you for using TechWelkin!
Hi Bro! I have read your post. And i have tested my site as well. Thanks a lot for this awesome post.
You’re welcome David! I am happy to be of assistance. Hope to hear more from you on TechWelkin.