7 Ideas for Using Strings to Monitor Your Website
Of all the checks available in Testomato, monitoring strings is one of our most versatile features. It’s also one of the features that often gets overlooked.
A text string is a piece of text that appears on a web page. With Testomato, you can check for the presence of a specific text string or make sure a piece of text that shouldn’t be there is not present.
There are a lot of ways to use strings in your checks that might not be obvious. With that in mind, we decided to pull together a few was you can use strings to monitor your website.
Important note: This post was updated in July 2015.
How to Check Strings in Testomato
- Click on the project you’d like to view or select a project from the All Projects menu in the top right corner.
- Click Add test and enter the URL of the page you’d like to monitor. You can also edit a check by clicking on the gear icon on a check box.
- Name your test and click Next.
- Set up test expectations for HTML on Page contains and click Save. You can add another rule by clicking on Add Rule.
- Copy or type in the text string you’d like to test for.
- Click Save.
A few more important tips:
- These tests are case sensitive, so make sure you PaY ClosE AtTentioN to the text you enter!
- You can enter HTML content on a page. (e.g.
<h1>Your Cool Title</h1>) - You can check more than one string by creating multiple lines of text separately (i.e. you don’t need to create a separate rule for each string).
7 Ideas for Ways to Use Strings
1) Correct Content in URL
You can check that the right content shows up in the URL of a web page (e.g. H1 content).
2) Google Analytics
Find the tracking code or property ID of your Google Analytics account on your website.
Enter your ID: UA-xxxxxx-x
3) Important Page Elements
Make sure the most important elements of a page are working properly.
4) Form Results
Monitor your forms by checking form results. For example, you can check for a search phrase in a search form. You can also check for success messages from a signup or login form.
5) Error Messages
You can also use string checks by creating a Rule for various error messages you do not want to be found on the page.
6) Login Forms
Test to make sure the data of a login form can be submitted correctly by checking to make sure that it isn’t present anymore on a page.
7) HTTP Header Testing
You’ll be able to test for HTTP headers to ensure that an application is responding, the correct cookie is served, or an API returns the correct content-type (e.g. application/JSON).
Have more questions about how to use strings to monitor your website?
Let us know in the comments below or on Facebook. You can also tweet us directly @testomatocom. We’re happy to help!
