When was the last time you looked your site through your visitors eyes?
I’m not talking about subjectively evaluating your design to grade it on how you think your visitors may see it; I mean actually loading the page to find out how it really looks at different screen resolutions. Are you visitors truly seeing what you think they’re seeing; or, do they have to scroll to see your most important page elements? If it’s latter, then you’ve already lost a good number of eyeballs.
With widescreen LCDs as cheap as they are, it’s easy to forget there are still lots of devices in this world with small screens. But don’t ignore screen resolution in your testing regimen. Without it, you could increase your bounce rate and reduce your conversions. You can’t count on users scrolling the page to see it all; and when they don’t see your message, it’s as if it isn’t there to begin with.
Clearly, this is a situation you want to avoid. Fortunately, there’s a very simple tool that lets you look at how much of your pages is seen – one that doesn’t require lots of tedious iterations through screen resolutions. You can make quick work of the problem with Google Browser Size : just give it a URL and it loads the page and shows you the percentage of visitors that will see the parts of your page at various resolutions.
Here’s how two of the most widely used home pages on the Internet look:
Amazon.com as shown in Google Browser Size
Google's home page loaded in Browser Size
This is one tool you should bookmark and make part of your test plan. It only takes a few seconds to use and the difference it makes could be substantial.