The manual website click test: why you need to check every element

Software can’t pick up on all website link problems, but human manual clicking can – if you have a process in place.

Many businesses assume their website works perfectly, not realising that there are parts of the website that are failing to impress potential customers – who are clicking on elements but not getting to where they expect to.  For example:

  • Clicking on a button that goes nowhere.
  • Clicking on a link that goes somewhere it shouldn’t.
  • A contact form button submission that fails because the form has been too fussy in what it’s asking for.

While it’s possible for software to detect some problems, it won’t identify many other challenges.

The solution?  A periodic manual click audit to find and fix issues before they cost you leads and sales.

This article covers:

  1. Free software for broken link detection.
  2. Why manual clicking on buttons, forms, and links is essential.
  3. A step-by-step guide to running an initial and periodic manual click audit.

Some examples of where only human clicking will work

This video shows just a few examples of why you need a human to pick up on such problems:

The limits of software: what it can and can’t detect

Before getting into the manual process, let’s acknowledge the additional importance of free software tools that can help avoid losing enquiries from website visitors (and should also be incorporated into a regular website audit) …

Broken Link Checkers

Broken Link Checker (Online Tool) – this is free and scans entire websites.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider – this is free to check up to 500 URLs and provides a detailed  broken link and redirect checker.

Google Search Console – also free and flags broken internal and external links.  You do have to set this up on your website but it’s what I’d consider an essential tool for many other reasons as well as link checking.

These tools are great for detecting links that no longer work, but they miss contextual issues that are broken from a human perspective (such as the examples above).

This is where human testing becomes important.

When do you need to run a manual website click audit?

Any time that your website has had significant changes, you should manually check everything is correct.

This would typically be when:

  1. You’ve had a complete website redesign – everything may look nice, but things do get missed (including website links still being to staging site pages).
  2. You’ve introduced a new way of doing things (e.g. a new contact form).
  3. Someone new has joined your business/team and has been active on making changes on the website.

Mistakes/oversights do happen so it’s wise for someone to manually click on everything within your website and to then formally verify the date that they have done this.

Why formally verify?  To ensure that they do the job properly to avoid any comeback if it later transpires there was an unidentified issue.

How to run a manual click audit – step by step

Step 1 – Ensure there’s a website changes audit log

Many businesses don’t have an ongoing record of when changes were made to their website.

Whether a shared document (e.g. Google Sheet) or something else, a website changes audit log would include these columns:

  • Date of change
  • Summary of change
  • Detail of change
  • Who made the change
  • Review date (useful if wanting to check the impact of a change made – such as checking the SEO impact from a new website page).

If you don’t have a website changes audit log then it’s very hard to track what caused things to get better or worse.

 

Step 2 – Diarise the need to check

One or more people in the business should have a diary reminder note periodically (e.g. monthly) to check the website changes audit log document and ensure that any recent changes have been added to that document (because sometimes things get forgotten).

 

Step 3 – Clicking on everything

This involves someone going to the website and clicking on every element, ensuring that they work as expected.

This includes checking the mobile view as well.

There are usually some exceptions to this:

  • Navigation bar elements – typically these would act in the same way on every page of the website so just need checking once.
  • Footer elements – you handle these the same as navigation bar elements
  • Consistent elements on each page (e.g. a side panel of links) – normally they would appear the same on every page so if there was a problem with a click, then one fix would usually fix all occurrences.

If you can see it and it’s clickable, including buttons and links that should take people elsewhere on the page or within the website, click on them.

This includes email links and phone numbers (that are set to be clickable).

Also check that the contact forms work in the way that you expect them to – ideally they would trigger a separate ‘thank you’ type url after submission.

 

Step 4 – Log issues and fix them quickly

If you have a regular manual website click testing reminder, then any problems you find can be logged in your website changes audit document and then fixed, or an action taken to get them fixed and for someone to check that they have been done.

The problems only start when you either don’t have that reminder, or no-one acts on the reminder.  That’s when website errors can remain undiscovered for too long, ultimately causing you lost enquiries from potential customers who associate the quality of what you do with the quality of you checking that your website works properly.