250 - Automated website testing with Ghost Inspector

‘A-Z of WordPress’ with Nathan Wrigley and David Waumsley

So you have a WordPress website and it’s all built and handed over to the client. You’re done! Hurrah! Wait a minute, you’re not done are you?

You need to get the client on to the care plan and that involves making sure that the website is up and running.

Chances are that you’ve used some simple tools for uptime monitoring. You know what I mean. The kind of tools that periodically ping your website and report back if the site is still alive.

You might even have gone a step further and employed a tool that offers you some sort of visual feedback. It will make sure that the site of yesterday looks like the site of today, and in this way you can be sure that nothing untoward has occurred.

But what if you wanted to go a step further? What if you wanted to check all-the-things, and not just make sure that the website is up, but that the website is working. There is a difference!

Today we speak to Justin Klemm about Ghost Inspector, which is tool which can do many, many things to make sure that your site is up and working.

The idea is that you or your client knows about something that’s gone wrong on the site before it starts to cost them, and let’s be honest, mistakes do happen and things do break!

Take the example of a form. You’re not going to know if your form breaks unless you test it, and you’re not going to test it all that often. Perhaps this form is the single biggest lead generator for your company, or perhaps it’s the checkout form for your online store. If that form goes down, it goes down silently, and you’ll never know it stopped working unless you fill it in yourself or some kind soul contacts you to tell you about it.

With Ghost Inspector you can set up all sorts of complex tests in your browser and their platform will carry out those tests for you and let you know when somethings is not as expected.

You use their browser extension and record events on the site, like mouse clicks, form field autocomplete and much more. You then say how often you want the test to be performed. That’s it.

In an ideal world you’ll never hear from Ghost Inspector again because everything always works, but it’s a great insurance policy to know that it’s got your back and will update you before you get the angry call from the client who wants to know just how long that form has been broken.

We go into all the details on the podcast today and Justin answer the following questions:

• What’s the main point of the software?
• Is suitable for simple, brochure websites, or just larger online properties?
• Are there any issues / integrations with WordPress directly?
• How does it work? Browser extensions? Tell us about the workflow, is it like creating a form with instructions of what to test?
• How complex and refined can you get?
• What specifically can it test?
• Does it test different scenarios, like desktop / mobile / other?
• Is this software available for your entire team?
• Does it offer guidance on how to fix things, or just that things are broken?
• Do you offer support in getting up and running? How does your support work? Chat / email etc.?
• Why would you want to use this instead of an uptime monitor or a site that just looks for changes on a page layout? What makes it stand out from the competition?
• Are there people for whom this is not a good fit?
• Are there ways that this can be used poorly, too much, not giving the data that you want need?
• What are the price points?
• What is on the roadmap for the future?

Have a listen to the podcast, and as always leave a comment if you have something to say, or you can reach out to Justin on his Twitter account.

Mentioned in this podcast:

Ghost Inspector