If you suspect that you might be pregnant, the most common sensical thing to do is to take a pregnancy test. Before you do, however, you might be inclined to take an online pregnancy test. No, this isn't a scientific analysis of your blood or urine, but it can help you to assess whether or not you should consider purchasing a pregnancy testing kit or seeing your doctor.

1. The Online Test

Not all online pregnancy tests are alike. Many of them give you a list of possible symptoms and allow you to decide if you have any of these. Then using the date of your last period as a guide marker, the site hosting the online pregnancy test will give you a possible due date for your baby if you are indeed pregnant. It doesn't give any information on the likelihood of this, instead it leaves it up to you to decide.

2. More In- Depth Online Tests

Many online pregnancy tests are more thorough and have checkboxes for a variety of relevant questions, such as whether or not condoms or other contraceptives were used. Among other things, the most important question is the date of your last period and your sexual activity around that time.

3. What Do The Results Mean?

Nothing really. It's not by any means accurate or scientific. The only purposes of the test are to, based on probabilities, tell you if the test things you are more or less likely to need to take a pregnancy test. In any case, most women choose to take a pregnancy test anyway regardless of the results of the online pregnancy test.

4. Other Pregnancy Tests

For entertainment purposes only there are a number of other online tests you can take during your pregnancy to provide answers to common questions such as whether or not you will have a boy or a girl. As you might suspect, their accuracy is also highly dubious, but some sites will actually require a subscription and take their testing methods quite seriously. They might even publish the sucess rate of their test on their site. The most reputable of these testing sites actually are run by doctors themselves or other medical practitioners and the testing is part of research they are conducting that will be published in a medical journal.