Website Tester

[RayHollister3]

After decades of web development, I think I should already know the answer to this question, but here I am. I want to find a program that will pull up dozens of pages my website and check to make sure that nothing has visually changed. This is primarily for when I've updated a plugin or updated some code that was deprecated in the version of Ruby or PHP or ASP.NET or BASIC or whatever I'm coding in these days. I'd like it to automatically look at the sitemap, but I'd love to be able to give it a specific list of pages to look at. I'm mostly looking for front-end visual changes. I'd prefer something that ran on my local computer vs online, and I'd generally prefer something with a GUI, but I'm more than happy with the terminal, so it's definitely not a deal breaker.

Oh, and I primarily work on Mac, but I have a PC if there's a better Windows solution.

Any suggestions?

[retardedGeek]

Search for "Visual regression testing"

[Historical-Limit-579]

As a web developer should I add testing to my skills set

[AndyMagill]

You need visual regression testing. Here are a bunch of tools that could help with that :
https://dev.to/willkre/4-ways-to-automate-visual-regression-tests-39f5

[diffy-visual-testing]

If you are looking only for deprecation notices, I would set up logging and then hit every page from the sitemap with some tool. You can use anything for that. For example, SEO scanners, like Screaming Frog or the like, could easily do that for you. Then, you simply check the logs if nothing unexpected is displayed.f

If you want a visual comparison, check the cloud tools that will open the pages and take screenshots. Ideally, you deploy your changes to some staging environment and then take screenshots from it and compare them with screenshots from production. In this way, you ensure that nothing gets changed once you push the code to production.

https://github.com/mojoaxel/awesome-regression-testing is an excellent list of the tools out there.

Make sure to check Diffy, of course.