Your Content Changes; Your Layout Doesn’t. Make Sure it Always Looks Good.

Visual tests are essential for making sure your website looks good, but they also can be challenging to run if your website has a lot of dynamic elements.

In a typical visual regression test, your goal is to compare new website versions against previously set baselines to check that unnecessary changes don’t accidentally get loaded to production. But if your content is expected to change, each regression test will yield a failed result, causing you to put in more effort to validate what should be a simple screenshot comparison.

This is why SmartBear has introduced Layout Mode for VisualTest. In this article, we’ll talk about the benefits of showing dynamic content, common challenges of website layout testing, and how you can use Layout Mode to overcome them.

What Is Dynamic Content?

Dynamic content is content on your website or application that changes to fit your users’ interests or intent. Using dynamic (or adaptive) content on your website lets you tailor your web experience to fit each individual user to maximize their engagement. Salesforce reports that 65% of retail customers will remain loyal to companies that provide personalized experiences.

Delivering a personalized experience is also essential for improving conversions and brand awareness. A recent McKinsey study found that 76% of customers are more likely to purchase from brands that personalize and 78% are more likely to return and refer these brands to their friends and family.

Put simply, dynamic content lets you deliver the personalized experiences your customers expect.

Examples of Dynamic Content

Many industries can take advantage of dynamic content to attract their customers. Here are only some of the most common examples:

• News & entertainment – Run stories relevant to your users’ interests to drive more readership and encourage them to spend more time on your site.
• Banking & financing – Highlight offers that are unique to your customers’ situations to generate more high-quality leads for better conversions.
• Ecommerce – Display the products your individual customers are most likely to purchase to increase sales.
• Gaming & apps – Show gameplay clips and share relevant apps to increase your downloads.
• Education – Share courses and other information pertinent to your students’ workload.

Layout Mode Is Meant for Testing Dynamic Content

While personalized content is a must, it can make page layout testing difficult. When you run your regression tests, target images always will be different than baseline images and so your tests will likely fail. You are then left with manually reviewing more screenshots in order to validate the other elements of your webpage.

Layout Mode for VisualTest can help you overcome this challenge.

With Layout Mode, you can “ignore” the dynamically shown content and focus solely on the layout of your website. This allows you to evaluate the components that serve as the main structure of your website and make sure they are ready to display any content your users want to see.

Layout Mode also can be set as the default, saving you the effort of writing script to ignore regions in your screenshots.

Try VisualTest Free Today

Whether your content is dynamic or static, VisualTest makes it easy to automate your UI tests so you can make sure your website always looks as you intend and your customers want. VisualTest is free and easy to use. Give it a try today.