The Major Role Played By Proxies In Web Testing

The importance of checking your website from every city in the world

Every company in the world that built an official website to address various users by displaying different languages and localized content is fully aware that it’s not easy to maintain a website for people located in multiple geolocations.

At the same time, from a general point of view, most web pages are designed by default to offer customized content to users from a particular area.

The importance of providing localized and customized content makes life a bit more difficult for developers, marketing managers, and QA teams who need to test a certain website to make sure the pages are displayed correctly, the online ad campaigns address the right people, and that the platform provides the necessary stability for users.

So, how are all these people going to make sure the website functions properly for people from every city in the world?

Since a website that addresses global audiences needs to integrate various languages, pricing structures, and cultural differences to address the right people, the website administrator or developer behind the platform needs to ‘see’ the website from a local perspective, no matter if the visitor is from Rome, Hamburg or Singapore.

Common issues for teams who engage in web testing

As we mentioned, a website admin or developer needs to analyze the way a website displays content from a local perspective. But there are a few factors to take into account every time this web testing process takes place:

• Local technical conditions

Let’s say that it’s necessary to check how responsive and generally usable the website is according to its geographical location. It is possible for a website serving customers from the same country to display certain issues for people from a different city. 

In this case, the web admin should try to reproduce the problem by going online with a residential IP address from that particular geolocation. It is quite possible for the issue to come from the local ISP or a data center in the area that affects the entire region. 

So, even though the website might seem to function properly from your own computer, things might change as we enter with a different IP address.

• Recreate the testing medium

This time again, let’s say that a certain customer complains about your website displaying the products’ pricing structure in a different currency. 

If you are going directly online from your own PC and you live in a different country, you may not notice any issue. 

However, if you enter the site again with a local IP address, you may notice the display error the customer was talking about. To make sure that you access the website as a local user, a residential proxy should be employed.

• Localized content

A website that should serve customers from all over the world needs to take into account the large variety of languages, currencies, pricing structures, unique commercial offers, restricted content due to regulations, etc. 

At the same time, a major website might run various marketing campaigns that are designed to attract users and increase sales. But all these things should always take into account the local specific requirements if they want to be successful. 

For instance, a website that serves Chinese customers should avoid any political references if it wants to continue functioning, or a website that addresses users from countries that are more focused on religion should take into account the local sensibilities and regulatory demands. 

Though it might seem like obvious straightforward elements to consider, sometimes all these factors escape the marketers’ attention and the websites should always be checked and ‘seen’ from a local perspective.

What proxies are the right choice for web testing

Since the process of testing your website to make sure it functions correctly all over the world is a vital task for every administrator, development & QA teams, it is quite obvious that a strong and reliable residential proxy network is required to get the job done.

Even more, to make sure you manage to connect to your website from every city in the world, it is more than important to take advantage of the residential proxy network that allows users to choose the geolocation of the IPs and go online as local users to obtain reliable information.

So, as we can notice, a global residential proxy network is useful for a great variety of cases, from testing your website to checking your online ads to function correctly in a local context by taking advantage of millions of residential IP addresses.