When you’re designing as website to be viewed across multiple devices with an enormous range of different screen sizes it’s essential that you’re able to see how your site will look on each and every device it could possibly be loaded onto in order to ensure your visitors get a consistent experience regardless of how they come across your website.
In the (not too distant) past whenever you wanted to test your website on another computer or phone you literally had to seek out these other computers or phones, searching for them far and wide and (often) even having to take a quick peek on a friend’s laptop to see what your site looked like from their point of view.
Nowadays we have emulators to take the hard work out of this task. These tech-focused mobile emulators can show you exactly what your website looks like on an iPhone 6 Plus compared to an iPhone 4, or what it looks like on a small Android tablet compared to the Microsoft Surface.
Never has there been a better time for these emulators to fight their way into existence. The number of devices (laptops, tablets, and smartphones) on sale today is something of a phenomenon, making designing pixel-perfect website that much harder without the help of these wonderful, time-saving emulators… and we’ve picked out four of the best for you to have a play with, below:
MobileTest
MobileTest is a site that allows you to test your website across a whole range of smartphones and tablets, with more devices being added incredibly frequently.
The best thing about MobileTest is how fast your site will load up when you put them to the test; they often don’t take any longer than they’d take to load normally, despite the fact that you’re running them via one of MobileTest’s emulators.
Responsivepx
Talking of checking the responsiveness of your design, Responsivepx give you a blank canvas in which to drag the edges to your heart’s content to come up with an emulator size that’s perfect for your needs.
One of the best features Responsivepx offers is the ability to play around with sites on your local server, which is ideal if you’ve not yet launched your site and you want to test how responsive it is on a wide range of smartphone and tablet sizes before putting it online for all the world to see.
Mobile Phone Emulator
The Mobile Phone Emulator has been around longer than any other emulator in this list, but that doesn’t mean it’s lost its touch; not by a long way.
Due to its age, Mobile Phone Emulator can allow you to test your site on a range of slightly older mobile devices if you have noticed from your website’s analytics that you’re still receiving a large amount of your traffic from these devices; BlackBerry smartphones being a great example of this.
iPad Peek
When the first iPad was launched none of us were sure if it was a product that would catch on, let alone a category that would start to rival the sales of laptops in a few short years. Nowadays there are some very well developed tablets out there, but few of them rival the iPad in terms of popularity and distribution.
For this reason, iPad Peek is an iPad-only emulator, making seeing how your website will look on an iPad (both in portrait and landscape modes) a breeze.
In conclusion, the next time you need to test out a new website across multiple devices, remember; save yourself some time by using mobile emulators to rest your site’s responsiveness.
Author:
Edgar Hopson currently writes on a freelance basis for a provider of a reliable site builder. SiteZulu is dedicated to helping people create a website that is wonderfully responsive.
