Test My WordPress

The Complete Guide to Testing Your WordPress Site

If you’re wondering, “How do I test my WordPress site?” you’re definitely not alone. Testing your WordPress site might sound like something only developers need to worry about, but it’s actually one of the most important things you can do to keep your website running smoothly, whether you’re a blogger, business owner, or agency managing client sites.

Think of testing as a safety net. It helps you catch problems before your visitors do, ensures your site loads quickly, keeps your data secure, and gives you peace of mind when you’re making updates. The good news? WordPress testing doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. We’re going to walk you through all the different ways you can test your site, from quick manual checks to automated testing solutions.

Why WordPress Testing Matters

Before we dive into the how-to, let’s talk about why testing is so critical. Your WordPress site is a living, breathing thing that’s constantly changing. Plugins get updated, themes evolve, WordPress core releases new versions, and you’re adding new content regularly. Any of these changes could potentially break something on your site.

Regular testing helps you identify issues such as broken links, slow load times, security vulnerabilities, compatibility problems, and functionality bugs before they affect your visitors or damage your search engine rankings. It’s much easier (and cheaper) to fix problems you catch yourself than to deal with customer complaints, lost revenue, or a hacked website.

Setting Up a Safe Testing Environment

The golden rule of WordPress testing is this: never test directly on your live site. You need a safe place to experiment without risking your actual website. Here’s how to create that safety net.

Create a Staging Site

A staging site is essentially a clone of your live website where you can test changes without affecting your visitors. Most quality WordPress hosts offer staging environments as part of their service. If you’re using EasyWP managed hosting, creating a staging site takes just a couple of clicks from your dashboard.

If your host doesn’t offer built-in staging, you can use plugins like WP Staging or Duplicator to create a staging environment yourself. These plugins let you duplicate your entire site to a subdomain or subdirectory where you can safely test.

Always Back Up First

Before making any significant changes or running tests, create a complete backup of your WordPress site. This includes both your files and database. Think of backups as your emergency escape hatch — if something goes terribly wrong during testing, you can restore your site to its previous state.

Many hosting providers offer automatic daily backups, but you should also maintain your own backup copies stored off-site. Plugins like BlogVault and UpdraftPlus make it easy to schedule automatic backups and store them on cloud services like Google Drive or Dropbox.

Test Your Backups Too

Here’s something many people forget: a backup is only useful if you can actually restore it. Make it a habit to test your WordPress backups regularly to ensure they work correctly. You can do this by restoring a backup to your staging environment and verifying that everything functions as expected.

Functionality Testing: Making Sure Everything Works

Functionality testing is all about confirming that your website’s features work as intended. This includes forms, buttons, menus, search functionality, and any interactive elements on your site.

Testing Forms and Contact Submissions

Your contact forms are often the primary way visitors communicate with you, so they need to work flawlessly. To test your WordPress contact forms, fill them out yourself and submit test entries. Use a different email address than your main one to verify that submissions are actually being delivered.

Check that validation works properly (required fields can’t be skipped, email addresses must be formatted correctly), that confirmation messages display, that submissions appear in your form’s database, and that email notifications arrive promptly. If you’re using popular form plugins like WPForms or Contact Form 7, they include built-in testing features.

Testing Navigation and Links

Broken links frustrate visitors and hurt your SEO. The Broken Link Checker plugin by AIOSEO is an essential tool that automatically scans your entire site for broken links and missing images. It’s a cloud-based service, so it won’t slow down your website or get blocked by managed hosting providers.

Once installed, Broken Link Checker monitors your posts, pages, comments, and custom fields, spotting broken or redirected URLs. You can fix issues right from the dashboard by editing links, unlinking them, or marking them to ignore. The plugin can even send you email alerts when it finds new broken links, so you’re never caught off guard.

Testing WordPress Plugins

Before installing any new plugin on your live site, test it in your staging environment first. Here’s a simple workflow:

First, create a full backup of your live site. Then set up or refresh your staging site to match your production environment. Install and activate the plugin on staging only. Test the plugin’s functionality thoroughly, including all its features and settings. Check for conflicts with other plugins by testing your site with all plugins active. Monitor your site’s performance to ensure the plugin doesn’t slow things down. Test across different browsers and devices.

If everything works smoothly on staging, you can confidently install the plugin on your live site. If you encounter issues, you’ve saved yourself (and your visitors) a lot of headaches.

Performance and Speed Testing

Speed matters — a lot. Studies show that even a one-second delay in page load time can significantly increase bounce rates and decrease conversions. Let’s look at how to test and optimize your WordPress site’s performance.

Testing Page Load Speed

Several excellent free tools can help you measure your site’s loading time and identify performance bottlenecks. Google PageSpeed Insights is probably the most popular tool, analyzing both mobile and desktop performance while providing specific recommendations for improvement. It measures Core Web Vitals like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

GTmetrix offers another comprehensive speed analysis, powered by both Google Lighthouse and YSlow. It provides detailed waterfall charts showing exactly how each element on your page loads. Pingdom Tools lets you test from different server locations worldwide, which is useful if you have a global audience.

When testing site speed, follow these best practices: always test multiple times to get accurate averages, test from different geographic locations, ensure caching is enabled, verify that your CDN is running, and test both mobile and desktop versions.

Load and Stress Testing

Load testing simulates multiple users accessing your site simultaneously to see how it handles traffic spikes. This is especially important if you’re expecting a surge in visitors from a marketing campaign or seasonal event.

Tools like Loader.io and K6 let you simulate hundreds or thousands of concurrent visitors. You can set the number of virtual users, test duration, and ramp-up time to mimic realistic traffic patterns. The test results show average and maximum response times, and the points at which your server starts to struggle.

Database Optimization Testing

Your WordPress database stores all your site’s content, settings, and user data. Over time, it accumulates unnecessary data —such as post revisions, spam comments, expired transients, and orphaned metadata — that can slow down your site.

Database optimization should be part of your regular testing routine. Plugins like WP-Optimize, Advanced Database Cleaner, and WP-Sweep make it easy to clean up your database and recover lost performance.

Security Testing: Protecting Your Site

Security should never be an afterthought. WordPress sites are frequent targets for hackers, but regular security testing can help you identify and fix vulnerabilities before they’re exploited.

Scanning for Malware

Free online scanners make it easy to check your WordPress site for malware without installing anything. Sucuri SiteCheck scans for known malware, blacklist status, website errors, and out-of-date software. VirusTotal uses over 70 antivirus scanners and URL/domain blocklisting services to check your site.

For more comprehensive protection, consider security plugins like Wordfence or Sucuri, which offer real-time malware scanning, firewall protection, and automatic malware removal. Cloud-based solutions like SiteLock from Namecheap provide daily scanning and automatic malware removal without impacting your server performance.

Penetration Testing

WordPress penetration testing involves simulating cyber attacks to identify security weaknesses. While full penetration tests are usually performed by security professionals, you can use tools like WPScan to scan for known vulnerabilities in your WordPress version, themes, and plugins.

The WPScan database contains information about thousands of WordPress security vulnerabilities, so running a scan can quickly reveal if your site has any known security holes that need patching.

SSL and HTTPS Testing

An SSL certificate encrypts data between your server and visitors’ browsers, protecting sensitive information. All modern WordPress sites should use HTTPS. You can test your SSL configuration using SSL Labs’ SSL Server Test, which grades your SSL setup and identifies any security issues.

Mobile Responsiveness Testing

More than 60% of web traffic now comes from mobile devices, so ensuring your WordPress site works perfectly on phones and tablets is absolutely essential.

Built-In WordPress Testing

WordPress includes a simple mobile preview tool right in your dashboard. When you’re editing a page or post, click the “Customize” option in your admin bar, then use the device icons at the bottom of the screen to preview how your site looks on different screen sizes. This is a quick way to spot obvious layout issues, though it doesn’t account for specific devices or landscape orientation.

Browser-Based Testing

Your browser’s developer tools offer more comprehensive mobile testing. In Chrome, right-click anywhere on your page and select “Inspect,” then click the device toolbar icon. This lets you test your site on specific device emulators, such as iPhone, iPad, and various Android phones. You can test both portrait and landscape orientations, simulate touch events, and even throttle network speed to see how your site performs on slower connections.

Using Chrome Extensions

The Re:view extension for Chrome makes mobile testing even easier. After installing, navigate to any page on your site and click the Re:view icon in your toolbar. The “Breakpoints View” shows you exactly where your layout changes as the screen width decreases. The “Device Wall” option displays your site simultaneously on multiple device screens, making it easy to spot inconsistencies.

Real Device Testing

While emulators are helpful, nothing beats testing on actual devices. If possible, check your site on real iPhones, Android phones, and tablets. Pay special attention to touch targets (are buttons easy to tap?), font sizes (is text readable without zooming?), navigation menus (do they work smoothly?), and form fields (are they easy to fill out?).

Services like BrowserStack provide access to over 3,000 real devices and browsers, letting you test across a wide range of configurations without buying dozens of physical devices.

Cross-Browser Testing

Your visitors use many different browsers — Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and sometimes even older versions. Your site needs to work properly in all of them.

Testing Tools for WordPress

BrowserStack Live is one of the most powerful cross-browser testing platforms. After signing up, select the browser-device-OS combination you want to test, and within seconds, you can interact with your site on that specific setup. BrowserStack even offers a WordPress plugin that adds a “Test with BrowserStack” button directly to your WordPress admin area.

BitBar offers both live testing and screenshot features. Select your operating system and browser, enter your URL, and BitBar shows you exactly how your site appears. You can also capture screenshots across multiple devices and browsers simultaneously.

LambdaTest provides a WordPress plugin that lets you take full-page screenshots of posts and pages across 2,000+ browser and OS combinations right from your WordPress admin panel. All screenshots are taken on real browsers running on real machines, helping you quickly identify browser-specific issues.

Manual Browser Testing

For basic testing, you can manually check your site in the major browsers yourself. Install Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge on your computer and test critical functionality in each one. Focus on navigation, forms, checkout processes (if you have e-commerce), and any JavaScript-heavy features. Look for visual glitches, layout shifts, font rendering differences, and functionality that works in some browsers but not others.

Testing WordPress E-Commerce and Checkout

If you run a WooCommerce store or any WordPress e-commerce site, thoroughly testing your checkout process is absolutely critical. A broken checkout means lost sales and frustrated customers.

Testing the Complete Purchase Flow

Testing your WooCommerce checkout should cover every step of the customer journey. Start by adding products to your cart and verify that quantities update correctly, prices display accurately, and the cart total calculates properly. Test applying coupon codes to ensure discounts are applied correctly.

Complete the entire checkout process, including entering shipping addresses and billing information and selecting shipping methods. Verify that shipping costs calculate correctly based on location. Test the order review page to confirm all information displays accurately. Complete test purchases using different payment methods to ensure each gateway processes transactions correctly.

Using Test Payment Gateways

Most payment processors offer sandbox or test modes that let you simulate transactions without processing real money. WooCommerce includes a “Check Payments” gateway that’s perfect for testing. Simply enable it in WooCommerce > Settings > Payments, then you can place test orders without any actual payment processing.

For credit card testing, payment gateways like Stripe and PayPal provide test card numbers you can use in test mode. This lets you verify that your payment integration works correctly before accepting real customer payments.

Testing Order Confirmation and Emails

After placing test orders, verify that order confirmation emails are sent to both the customer and the store admin. Check that these emails contain all relevant order information, display correctly across different email clients, and include working links (such as order tracking links). Test that email notifications are sent for the following order statuses: processing, completed, refunded, and canceled.

Accessibility Testing

Making your WordPress site accessible ensures that people with disabilities can use your site effectively. It’s not just the right thing to do — it’s also often legally required.

Understanding WCAG Standards

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) provide the framework for web accessibility. The guidelines are organized around four principles: perceivable (users must be able to perceive information), operable (users must be able to operate the interface), understandable (users must be able to understand the information and operation), and robust (content must work with assistive technologies).

Automated Accessibility Testing

Several WordPress plugins can scan your site for accessibility issues. Accessibility Checker by Equalize Digital runs over 40 automated checks based on WCAG 2.2 and highlights exactly which elements fail accessibility standards. It scans posts and pages each time you save, showing errors and warnings directly in the edit screen.

The Accessibility Tool Kit plugin automatically detects and addresses common accessibility issues across your WordPress site, from missing labels to improper heading structure and keyboard navigation traps. It helps make your site compliant with WCAG 2.1 level A and AA, Section 508, and ARIA guidelines.

Manual Accessibility Checks

Automated tools catch many issues, but manual testing is also important. Try navigating your entire site using only your keyboard (no mouse). Can you reach all interactive elements? Is the focus indicator clearly visible? Test your site with a screen reader like NVDA (Windows) or VoiceOver (Mac). Do images have descriptive alt text? Are headings structured logically? Is link text descriptive?

Check color contrast using a tool like the WebAIM Color Contrast Checker. Your text and background colors should meet WCAG contrast ratios to ensure readability for people with low vision.

SEO Testing

Search engine optimization affects your site’s visibility in Google and other search engines. Regular SEO testing helps you maintain and improve your rankings.

Testing with Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is the most popular WordPress SEO plugin, and it includes powerful testing features. After installing Yoast, you’ll see an SEO analysis panel on every post and page. This analyzes your content for readability, keyword optimization, meta descriptions, and more.

The plugin uses a traffic light system (red, orange, green) to grade your content, making it easy to see where improvements are needed. For testing purposes, you can use the Yoast Test Helper plugin which makes it easier to test Yoast SEO features and database migrations without affecting your live settings.

Checking Search Engine Indexing

Use Google Search Console to monitor how Google sees your site. Submit your sitemap, check for crawl errors, and verify that important pages are being indexed. The URL Inspection tool lets you test how Google renders specific pages on your site.

The Google Mobile-Friendly Test checks if individual pages work well on mobile devices — an important SEO factor since Google uses mobile-first indexing.

Testing Structured Data

Structured data helps search engines better understand your content and can lead to richer search results. Use Google’s Rich Results Test to verify that your structured data markup is implemented correctly and eligible for rich results.

Theme Testing and Switching

Changing your WordPress theme can dramatically alter your site’s appearance and functionality. Proper testing ensures you don’t lose content or break features during the switch.

Creating a Theme Testing Checklist

Before switching themes, test the new theme thoroughly on your staging site. Check that all your content displays correctly (posts, pages, images, custom post types). Verify that navigation menus appear and work properly. Test all widgets and ensure they’re in the correct locations. Confirm that custom functionality from your old theme hasn’t disappeared.

Check plugin compatibility, especially with page builders or e-commerce plugins. Test your contact forms, sliders, galleries, and any other interactive elements. Review your site on different devices and browsers to ensure the new theme is responsive and cross-browser compatible.

Using Theme Testing Plugins

The Theme Switcha plugin lets you preview and develop themes privately while visitors continue using your default theme. As an administrator, you can switch to an alternate theme just for your view, test it thoroughly, and develop it behind the scenes. Once you’re satisfied, you can then activate it for all visitors.

Testing Theme Performance

Different themes have vastly different impacts on site speed. Use PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to test your site’s loading time before and after switching themes. Some bloated themes include features you’ll never use, which slow down your entire site. Performance-focused themes like GeneratePress, Astra, or Kadence are specifically designed for speed.

Uptime Monitoring

Your site needs to be online and accessible 24/7. Uptime monitoring tools check your site regularly and alert you immediately if it goes down.

Top Uptime Monitoring Tools

UptimeRobot is one of the most popular free options. It checks up to 50 sites every 5 minutes on the free plan and sends instant alerts via email, SMS, or Slack when your site goes down. The paid plans offer monitoring every 30-60 seconds and detailed uptime reports.

Jetpack Monitor integrates directly with WordPress if you’re already using the Jetpack plugin suite. It provides real-time monitoring and immediately alerts you to downtime. For agencies managing multiple client sites, ManageWP offers uptime monitoring combined with comprehensive site management tools.

WP Umbrella is built specifically for WordPress, offering uptime monitoring, automatic backups, update management, and PHP error tracking. You can notify multiple team members via email or Slack and monitor response times from locations around the world.

Setting Up Monitoring Alerts

When configuring uptime monitoring, set up alerts that go to multiple team members so someone will always see downtime notifications. Choose alert methods that will actually reach you — email is standard, but SMS or Slack notifications are harder to miss. Most tools also let you set up status pages to keep customers informed during outages.

User Acceptance Testing (UAT)

User Acceptance Testing puts your WordPress site in the hands of real users before launch to verify it meets their needs and expectations.

Planning Your UAT Process

Effective UAT starts with identifying your stakeholders — the people who need to sign off before launch. This might include members of the marketing team, content editors, business owners, and key clients. Define clear testing criteria upfront: what does “ready to launch” actually mean for your site?

Create a structured testing period, typically one to two weeks. Provide testers with specific scenarios to work through, like creating a blog post, submitting a contact form, or completing a purchase. Collect all feedback in one central location (Google Sheets, Jira, or your project management tool) and categorize issues by priority: must-fix-before-launch vs. can-fix-after-launch.

Collecting and Managing Feedback

Tools like BugHerd make UAT feedback collection much easier. Testers can simply click any element on your site to leave a comment, and BugHerd automatically captures all technical context (browser, screen size, URL, console errors). Each comment becomes a task on a Kanban board for easy management.

For simpler projects, you can use Google Forms or shared spreadsheets to collect tester feedback. The key is making it easy for testers to report issues and for your team to track and resolve them.

Regression Testing After Updates

Whenever you update WordPress core, themes, or plugins, you risk introducing new bugs or breaking existing functionality. Regression testing helps you catch these issues.

What is Regression Testing?

Regression testing means retesting your site after changes to ensure that everything still works as it did before. When you update a plugin, for example, you should test not just that plugin’s features, but also check that it didn’t break anything else on your site.

The MainWP Regression Testing Extension automates this process by comparing your site’s source code before and after updates. It captures a snapshot of your HTML output, then compares it after changes to highlight differences. This helps you spot subtle alterations to page structure, JavaScript changes, or SEO-impacting modifications to meta tags.

Creating a Regression Testing Checklist

Develop a standard checklist of functionality to test after every update: forms still submit successfully, navigation menus work, search functionality operates correctly, user logins/registrations work, checkout processes complete, payment gateways connect, and email notifications send. Run through this checklist on your staging site after updates before pushing changes to production.

Testing with WordPress Debug Mode

WordPress includes built-in debugging tools that help you identify and fix code errors during development and testing.

Enabling WordPress Debug

WordPress debug mode is controlled by constants in your wp-config.php file. To enable full debugging, add these lines before the “That’s all, stop editing!” comment:

define( 'WP_DEBUG', true );
define( 'WP_DEBUG_LOG', true );
define( 'WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false );
@ini_set( 'display_errors', 0 );

This configuration logs all PHP errors, notices, and warnings to a debug.log file in your wp-content directory without displaying them on your site (which would be a security risk on a live site). The SCRIPT_DEBUG constant can also be enabled to use development versions of core JavaScript and CSS files.

Reading Debug Logs

Once debugging is enabled, check the wp-content/debug.log file regularly during testing. This file shows you detailed information about any PHP errors, including the exact file and line number where problems occur. This makes troubleshooting plugin conflicts and theme issues much faster.

For ongoing monitoring, tools like WP Umbrella automatically track PHP errors without requiring you to manually enable debug mode or dig through log files.

Visual Regression Testing

Visual regression testing compares screenshots of your site before and after changes to spot unintended visual differences.

How Visual Regression Works

Visual regression testing tools capture baseline screenshots of your pages and compare them with new screenshots after you make changes. The tool compares these screenshots pixel-by-pixel and highlights any differences. This automated approach catches visual bugs that you might miss during manual testing — like layout shifts, overlapping elements, or incorrect colors.

WordPress Visual Regression Tools

The VRTs plugin brings automated visual regression testing directly into WordPress. After activation, it takes reference screenshots of your selected pages. Every day (or after WordPress updates with the Pro version), it captures and compares new screenshots. If changes are detected, the plugin sends email alerts and displays a detailed diff view.

For larger projects, enterprise tools like Percy, BackstopJS, or Chromatic offer more advanced visual regression testing with features like automatic screenshot comparison, collaboration tools, and CI/CD integration.

Testing Best Practices and Tips

Let’s wrap up with some general best practices that apply to all types of WordPress testing.

Use a Systematic Approach

Create checklists for different testing types to ensure you don’t miss any important steps. Document your testing process so other team members can follow the same procedures. Keep a record of what you tested, when you tested it, and what the results were. This historical data helps you track improvements over time and provides valuable information when troubleshooting issues.

Test Often, Not Just Before Launch

Don’t save all your testing for right before a major site launch. Make testing a regular part of your WordPress maintenance routine. Test after every plugin update, theme change, or content addition. Catch small problems early before they snowball into bigger issues. Weekly or monthly testing schedules work well for most sites.

Consider Your Actual Users

Think about how real people actually use your site. What devices do they use? What browsers do they prefer? What tasks are they trying to accomplish? Test those scenarios specifically. Involve actual users in your testing process when possible — their feedback is invaluable.

Use Automation Where Possible

Manual testing is important, but it’s time-consuming and easy to forget. Automate what you can: uptime monitoring, broken link checking, security scans, performance monitoring, and backup creation. This frees up your time to focus on testing that requires human judgment.

Keep Security in Mind

Always test on staging or development sites, never on your live site. Never commit sensitive data (passwords, API keys) to version control. Use test accounts and test data during testing rather than real customer information. Keep your staging environment secure since it contains a copy of your production database.

Essential WordPress Testing Resources

Here are some of the most valuable testing tools and resources mentioned throughout this guide:

Performance Testing:

Security Testing:

Functionality Testing:

Browser and Device Testing:

Accessibility Testing:

SEO Testing:

Uptime Monitoring:

Staging and Backup:

E-Commerce Testing:

Wrapping Up

Testing your WordPress site doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Start with the basics — create a staging environment, set up automated backups, and test your site’s core functionality. Then gradually add more sophisticated testing as you become comfortable with the process.

Remember that testing is an ongoing activity, not a one-time event. Make it a regular part of your WordPress workflow, and you’ll catch problems early, maintain better site performance, and provide a superior experience for your visitors.

The investment you make in testing — whether it’s time, tools, or both — pays dividends in peace of mind, better site quality, and fewer emergency fixes. Your future self (and your users) will thank you.

What aspects of WordPress testing do you find most challenging? Are there specific testing scenarios you’d like to know more about? Leave a comment below and let’s keep the conversation going.