You need a responsive, agile, and fast web application to deliver flawless customer experience. To make sure your app is running as per the user expectation, it is essential to have robust load testing of the website. End-to-end load testing also helps in improving the SEO ranking of the website.
Load testing is primarily done to identify the capacity of a website to handle a number of concurrent users at a single point in time. It is also known as performance testing. It helps in identifying and fixing performance gaps that may occur with abrupt increase in number of users or due to large amounts of traffic over a long period of time. In a nutshell, reliable and robust load testing services are business-critical for any business to offer a reliable and customer-focused digital solution.
Let us dive in deeper to understand the details of load testing including challenges, types, and the business value of the entire process.
Common challenges
Online businesses often find it challenging to compete with the brick and mortar physical stores. Earlier it was really difficult to pace with the interactivity and engagement levels of retail stores. But now we can leverage the highly advanced machine learning (ML) technology that can be clubbed with augmented reality to achieve performance at par. Also, these executions require load testing on an ongoing basis to deliver a flawless shopping experience.
Balancing the website’s performance with rich content, design, fonts, UI and user experience among others can be challenging. On top of that, backend processes like payment processing, page load time, speed, inventory checking, and more could also add up to your performance woes. Apart from increased complexity, such things also add functionality to the website, that at times is not easy to control. Robust load testing services know the impact of all these business-critical elements and thus are able to efficiently manage the overall impact of any website.
Load testing or performance testing is seldom being confused as the single task which is not accurate from any parameter. In fact, it is a very complex process where a series of different tests are done throughout the development cycle. These tests in return assist in mitigating all the performance issues.
Ensuring the reliability of a website
You should consider software performance testing services as one of the most reliable solutions to deliver a flawless user experience from your web app. The new-age test engineers are highly trained and aware of all the details involved in a robust performance testing process. The performance testing results will only improve significantly if this progressiveness continues and evolves with reliable technology evolution happening in the QA space.
To start with, the software testing team starts the load testing session right from the planning stage and then moves ahead to the development stage to make sure your web app is able to deliver results seamlessly and meet the required requirements efficiently.
Here is how an elaborate performance testing session with all its types would look like:
Volume testing
Volume testing is also termed as flood testing in the industry. It is done on heaps of large volumes of user data. The high volumes can often translate into heavy input files, database files, and data records. It helps in identifying the precise amount of users or calls that your website can handle at a single point in time. The results from the test help in evaluating the productivity of your app or website.
Scalability testing
It is a non-functional type of testing method that calculates the capability of the application along with the reference to its capability of scaling up or down in the event of an abrupt influx in processing power or architecture. One challenge that engineers often encounter is calculating the exact capacity of the system to handle traffic. It can be fixed by right-sizing and adhering to the best scalability testing practices. It can also help in achieving maximum output and preventing the app breakdown event during peak hours.
Performance testing
Test engineers effectively leverage advanced day performance testing solutions to create a virtual traffic load to identify performance gaps and fix them if required. The main objective of this test is to cut down the time taken by the web application to process commands under significantly increasing load.
Stress Testing
Stress testing is done to identify the resilience of a device, platform, and network under extreme laid conditions including overcapacity of users on the website amid unprecedented events like black Friday sale or holiday seasons. It can also help you identify the break point of any app. This in turn would enable you to take preventive measures for your apps during the periods where you expect large spikes in user traffic on your website.
Soak Testing
Soak testing is also known as ‘endurance testing’. It is basically leveraged to fix memory leaks of the system. The end goal is to analyze the system’s behavior under sustained peak load. Soak testing helps in improving the response time of a website under sustained load conditions.
Spike Testing
Spike app testing helps in identifying the behavior of an application under sudden fluxes including increase in the number of users, increase of requests, and more. Apart from checking your app’s performance in a real-world like scenario under several burst conditions it also helps you to cross check whether the web app is capable of recovering back after the spike activity is wrapped up.
How load testing enables businesses to enhance the performance of web apps?
With a constant increase in the number of users browsing your website, the current capacity of your servers need to be increased in order to handle the contracting request counts. Once the main server of the application reaches the threshold level, it stops taking any additional request. This could translate into several performance issues including slower response time, data errors, and even crashing of the application. Here load testing kicks in to help in rectifying all the major performance issues including slow load times, unidentified errors, and crashes among others.
Load testing also enables you to identify the server’s real-world capacity and assists in enhancing the performance of apps during the first influx of traffic in real-time. It helps in making all the necessary changes and performance adjustments on the basis of load testing results. By effectively using load testing for the website, you can reliably deliver the performance that your users are expecting from the application.
Wrapping Up
Amid COVID-19, enterprises all over the world are accelerating digital transformation and embracing technology like never before. Digital marketing and online applications have become the first point of contact between businesses and customers in various domains. In such scenarios, it has become business-critical to deliver flawless customer experience. And a reliable and smooth functioning app has become a necessity for a customer-delight solution.
Load testing can help business owners to operate websites that are future-ready to tackle all sorts of performance issues including the abrupt spike in traffic and stress taking capability of an application. It will also help businesses to reduce down time and offer customers a reliable and more user friendly solution.