How to test your Web Story [Web story essential]

How to test your Web Story

Web Stories are open web documents, just like pages on websites. They can appear on various surfaces, like Search, Discover, social media, messaging apps, and more. Testing Web Stories ensures that they're high quality and contain all the necessary artifacts.

While the galaxy of testing is limitless, I want to point out that it is not required. You can certainly publish great stories with minimal or no testing. But following some suggestions in this article can help fix some common errors. 

 

Especially if you're regularly publishing, taking some time to test one of your stories can help you avoid mistakes for the next one. To start, once a story is created, run through some simple visual checks to make sure the story looks good for all your users. We touched on some of these in the metadata episode. 

 

But to summarize, make sure that the poster or cover image for the story does not contain any text that is burned into it, and try to limit the title of the story to 70 characters or fewer to avoid any truncation. Also, avoid walls of text by limiting the text on individual pages to less than 300 characters. Make sure the font used is not too small and is readable. 

 

Next, check to make sure your Web Stories look good across different mobile devices and screen sizes. However, not all of us have a box of devices lying around. You can simulate several mobile devices using a simple browser URL hack. Simply append #development=1 to the end of your story URL, and you'll see this handy preview tool. 

 

We recommend checking how your story looks on common devices, like Moto G4, iPhone 5, iPhone X, and Pixel 2. Ensure you check that your text does not overflow unexpectedly, is not blocked by other images on the screen, and does not merge in with the background. 

 

Web Stories use the AMP format under the hood, which utilizes a strict source code validation concept. I know it sounds like I'm getting ultra-technical, but don't despair. Most of the time, you don't have to worry about this, as most visual editors already produce valid Stories out of the box. 

 

Sometimes, however, a certain WordPress plugin that went rogue or some other process on your website server might cause havoc to the final output. So it's a great idea to make sure your Web Stories are valid once you produce them because if they're not, they, for example, won't appear on Google Discover's storey carousel. 

 

So it's definitely in your interest to do a quick check. The easiest way to do this is via the Web Stories Google test tool.
But it's useful to learn about this stuff. From within this tool, you may also preview how your story will appear in Google Search. 

 

As a bonus, we recommend checking your story against the Rich Results test tool. This helps determine whether your content will show up as a search result beyond just the standard blue links-- for instance, in a Visual Stories blog. I also highly recommend reviewing "Storytime" episode 10, which covers some crucial metadata and artifacts we recommend your storey contains. 

 

Now that your story looks good and can, in theory, be indexed, let's make sure Google and other web crawlers can actually get to it. First, link to your Web Story directly from regular pages on your website or add your stories into your sitemap. Like Web Stories for WordPress, certain tools do this automatically for you, but best to check if you're unsure. 

 

If you want to create a new sitemap specific to Web Stories, make sure it is available to Google via one of the many mechanisms on this help page. Second, check your story against the URL Inspection tool in the Search Console. 

 

I already mentioned this tool earlier, but what does it actually do? It tests for several things, including checking that your story isn't blocked to Google bot, your Web Story is self-canonical, your Web Story has no known crawl issues, and more. 

 

So that was a whirlwind tour into the world of testing Web Stories. Making sure your stories are visually beautiful and engaging, as well as technically sound and discoverable, will go a long way in building trust with readers.