By failing to prepare, you prepare to fail. That’s why it’s essential to properly test a webinar beforehand.

The test is meant to check all technical and functional features of the webinar so everything will run smoothly when the audience is there to witness the presentation. You’ll be able to start the real webinar with confidence.

One of the nice things about testing is the ability to test as often as you’d like!

From your webinar overview, select the webinar you want to test by clicking on its title. You can start the webinar's dry run at any given moment by clicking on 'Dry run'.

After the preparation screen, you’ll find yourself in the configuration screen for the dry run. You aren’t live yet; to go live, you will have to enter the webinar room and then click ‘Start dry run’.

When entering the test webinar for the first time, your browser will ask for permission to use your camera and microphone.

Choose 'Allow while visiting the site' for permanent permission or 'Allow this time' for temporary permission and you will find yourself in the preparation screen. This is where you select the camera and microphone you want to use.

The gray bar below the microphone selection is the audio indicator. Speak into the microphone and the bar will indicate whether or not audio is being picked up.

Next, let’s take a quick look at the three buttons above the camera and microphone selection.

The left one, with the camera icon, allows you to toggle your camera.

The middle one, with the microphone icon, allows you to toggle your microphone.

The right one, with the icon depicting a person in front of a screen, allows you to toggle and choose your virtual background.

There are also two toggles on this page.

The 'Enable noise cancellation' setting automatically removes background noise during your webinar when enabled.

The 'Mirror video preview' makes your camera feed show as you would see yourself in a mirror.

Now that you’ve selected your camera and microphone and determined what you want enabled and disabled, click ‘Enter webinar’ and you will be taken to the webinar room. Don’t worry! All of these settings can still be changed later.

As mentioned above, camera and microphone settings can still be toggled on and off in the webinar room itself.

To access the device settings from the webinar room,click 'Settings' below the sidebar to your right, then choose 'Device settings'.

This will open a settings window where you can change the selected camera and microphone the same way you did in the preparation screen. It also features the audio indicator to test if your microphone selection is working properly, the noise cancellation toggle, the mirror video preview setting and the high-quality video option. Once you’ve made your changes, exit the settings window by pressing the ‘x’ at the top right.

Have you got the right camera and microphone selected? Great! Let’s move on to adding an attendee to the webinar.

If you want to test your webinar as an attendee yourself, you can open a second tab or window as a test attendee.

In the test webinar room, take a look at the sidebar to the right. In the ‘Attendance’ tab, you will find two icons. Click on the eye icon to open the test webinar as an attendee.

A second option for testing your webinar is inviting a test attendee. This can be done with the icon next to the ‘View as attendee’ button.

Click it and a new window will appear. This window shows a list of the test attendees you've invited thus far.

If the test attendee you want to invite is already in this list, you can click the link icon to get their unique link.

To invite someone new, click the 'Invite someone' button.

In the window that appears, fill out the test attendee's information and then click either ‘Show invitation link’ or ‘Send invitation via email’. If you choose ‘Show invitation link’, make sure to manually share the link with the test attendee so that they can access the webinar.

Now that the tester is present in their viewing environment, they will be able to see your test webinar as soon as it goes live.

Test webinars have the same system requirements as live webinars. You can find those system requirements here.

First, make sure that:

Now click the ‘Start dry run’ button in the top right of the screen.

In the window that appears, confirm that you want to go live by pressing the ‘Start dry run’ button.

A notification will appear notifying you of the fact that you're live, and the status indicator at the top left of the screen will change to reflect that.

When you want to end the test webinar, all you have to do is press ‘End dry run’.

In the sidebar to your right, press the 'Content' tab. A list of your presentation slides will appear under 'Presentation'.

To start the presentation, click the presentation button below the video. The selected presentation slide will appear on both your and your attendees' screens.

You can use the left and right arrow keys, mouse or a USB remote control to change the presentation slide.

The presentation will be shown next to your video by default.

Want to change the presentation layout to full screen? Simply disable your camera. This will make your video disappear from view and enlarge the presentation. You can re-enable your camera when you want to appear on screen again.

If you want to stop sharing your presentation, press the presentation button again.

In the sidebar to your right, press the ‘Content’ tab. A list of the videos added to your webinar will appear when you press 'Videos'.

To start a video injection, click the ‘Play video’ button next to the video in question. The video will begin playing on both your and your attendees' screens.

Your attendees will be unable to hear or see you while the video is playing. You will be visible and audible again as soon as the video ends.

The loudspeaker icon allows you to mute the video for yourself. Clicking this video turns off the video's sound for you, but your attendees will still be able to hear the video.

If you want to stop the video early, just press the ‘End video’ button.

In the test environment, click on the screen share icon under the video to share your screen.

In the window that appears, select what you’d like to share and then press the ‘Share’ button.

If you want to stop sharing your screen, press the screen share button again.

In the sidebar to your right, press the ‘Interactions’ tab. Click on a type of interaction and the category will unfold to show you all the interactions you’ve made of that type.

Click on the specific interaction you’d like to use. You will get the option to either end the interaction manually or after a set amount of time. Press ‘Start’ to start the interaction. If you select the latter, define the time you want the interaction to be visible for before pressing ‘Start’.

Polls and quizzes show up in your test attendees' sidebar. Call-to-actions and infoboxes show up below the video.

To end an interaction, simply click the ‘End interaction’ button.

Once you’ve started and ended an interaction, that specific interaction will appear in the ‘Past interactions’ section. There, you can find the result of all the interactions you’ve used in the webinar so far.

You can find the 'Chat' tab in the sidebar on the right side of the page.

Opening the 'Chat' tab in the sidebar will show you three sub-categories:

When a chat is disabled, open it in the sidebar and click ‘Enable public/private chat’ to enable it.

To disable a chat, open it in the sidebar and click the speech bubble with the slash through it at the top right.

Webinar team members can now pop out the sidebar and use it in a different browser window or even on a different device like a phone or a tablet. By following the steps below you can open the sidebar on a different device or a browser window on the same device. For the former, you can scan a QR code, for the latter you can get a link.

If you want to open the sidebar on a different device you can click 'Open side on a device'. You will the see a QR code.

You can then scan the QR code using either your phone or tablet. If you wish to open the sidebar on a separate window but use the same device then you can click 'Open sidebar on a separate window'.

The sidebar will then look like this, it looks the same if you open it on a different device or different window.

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