GUI test automation with Cypress: what it looks like in practice

Daniel @ 2026-02-06

The user interface of customer portals and e-commerce sites is where value is delivered, and where the biggest risks tend to hide. This is the layer where visitors choose, type, click, and confirm. A small change in a form or checkout can be enough to make a button unclickable, tighten validation too much, or cause a step to fail without warning. It can also prevent an error message from showing when it should. Issues like these have a direct impact on conversion and customer satisfaction, yet they rarely show up in API tests or unit tests. That’s why GUI test automation is such a practical way to make your most important customer flows predictable, especially when you deploy changes regularly. In this case study, we’ll walk you through how it works and why it matters.

Daniel

Lead Developer

How do you build a reliable set of GUI tests?

In this case study, we’ll show how you can use Cypress to build a reliable set of GUI tests around a Magento-style customer registration form. We’ll also explain how the same approach can easily be extended to checkouts and other high-impact screens. The key idea is simple: GUI test automation should validate the flow as the user experiences it. You don’t just want to know whether the backend accepts a request. You also need to know whether the page renders correctly, whether fields respond the way they should, and whether error messages appear in the right place. Ultimately, the user should be able to complete the process without running into blockers.

Where’s the challenge with GUI regressions?

One of the biggest challenges is that GUI regressions often happen “silently.” After a deployment, everything may look fine at first glance, but in the background a label may have shifted, making an element no longer clickable. A field may be treated as empty when it shouldn’t be, or the order of steps may change due to a script or plugin. In Magento environments in particular, themes, extensions, and custom scripts all come together. This means the risk of interface regressions is very real. You also can’t solve this with API tests alone, for one simple reason: UI behavior depends on component state, JavaScript, CSS, and sometimes timing. To catch these issues, you need to test what actually happens in the browser, meaning the GUI itself.

GUI test automation as a safety net

In practice, GUI test automation becomes a safety net you can activate again and again. You run the same test suite after each change to a customer flow, checkout, or form. That way, you can detect early whether the interface still behaves as expected, something that’s especially important when you work across multiple clients or continuously optimize for conversion. It allows you to iterate faster without having to manually repeat every variant of a flow each time.

Cypress in the context of GUI test automation

Cypress is a testing framework that runs web application tests in a real browser environment. One major advantage is that Cypress doesn’t focus only on API responses or isolated functions. Instead, it’s built around real user interactions: opening pages, finding elements, clicking, typing, selecting options, and verifying what the user sees on screen. That’s exactly what makes it so suitable for GUI test automation. With Cypress, you can automate the true end-to-end experience from screen to screen while validating visible UI states and feedback along the way. This visibility is useful for engineers, but it’s also valuable for communicating with clients or business stakeholders. GUI tests are intuitive to explain because they validate the actual user experience rather than abstract technical conditions. Another benefit is that Cypress can capture runs with videos and screenshots, making it immediately clear what was tested and where a flow failed.

The case: testing a registration flow like a real user

For this project, we chose a customer registration form as the starting point. It’s a classic GUI flow: lots of interaction, lots of validation, and plenty of opportunities for a user to get stuck. The test suite focuses on behavior users actually experience. What happens if someone skips a field or clicks too quickly? What if a user chooses a password that doesn’t meet policy requirements, or enters an invalid email address? GUI tests are especially valuable when they protect UX quality and error handling. A form can be “technically functional” and still hurt conversion if it doesn’t show clear, helpful error messages. That’s why the suite checks multiple aspects of the interface and flow. The screen must load correctly, all required fields must be visible and usable, input must be accepted or rejected correctly, error messages must be clear and logically placed, and the process must be fully completable when valid information is entered.

What exactly do we lock in with GUI tests?

The goal of GUI test automation is to capture behavior the way you promise it to your users. That sounds straightforward, but in practice it requires discipline in deciding what you will and won’t validate. You focus on functional GUI expectations: is a field present and interactive, does an error message appear for the right input, does the UI behave correctly when input is invalid, and does the user end up in the correct state after submitting? By making these expectations explicit, you avoid confusion when something changes. A change is perfectly fine as long as the core expectation remains the same. If the expectation does change, you update it intentionally in the test suite. In that sense, the test suite becomes a contract for the user interface, creating predictability, which is exactly what you need for forms and checkouts.

Stability is everything in GUI testing

GUI tests live or die by stability. If your tests rely on fragile selectors or DOM structures that change frequently, you end up constantly “fixing” tests instead of validating the product. That’s why it’s smart to give flow-critical UI elements stable identifiers, such as test-specific data attributes. This allows teams to update the layout without immediately breaking the test suite. Test data plays a role here as well. A registration flow can’t reuse the exact same email address on every run without creating conflicts. That’s why you work with repeatable test data like controlled accounts in a test environment, or dynamically unique values. The core principle is that the GUI test must be able to run successfully again and again, so it can serve as a reliable regression check after every change.

What’s the real value of GUI test automation?

GUI tests deliver the most value when they are built into your release process. Once they’re no longer dependent on a person manually re-testing flows, they become a consistent part of your quality gate. The GUI tests run automatically in a staging or test environment whenever changes are introduced. If something breaks, you catch it before customers do. If everything is green, you have confidence that the most important screens and flows still work correctly. For client projects, this is what shifts teams from reactive to proactive. Instead of waiting for issues to be reported, you verify the interface consistently after every change. And because Cypress is designed for fast debugging, teams can correct issues quickly without long reproduction cycles.

See GUI test automation in action

In the video below, you can see a Cypress GUI test run for a registration flow. It shows how the interface is executed step by step and validated for rendering, interaction, and input validation. This is representative of how we regression test other GUI flows after every change as well, including checkouts and Magento forms. Want to learn more about how this could work for your organization? Feel free to contact us.