Application failures on Black Friday can cause a negative impact on the revenue and reputation of the company. There are many renowned e-commerce companies that have faced this distress and have had a major setback during Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale.

Taking into consideration the previous years’ statistics, performance testing has to be more robust for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Though it is extremely challenging to survive through Black Friday and Cyber Monday, an extensive performance testing strategy can make it easier to achieve our goals successfully.

Let us discuss the best performance management strategies that can make it easier for e-commerce companies to survive through the big days.

An Increase in the website capacity

Analytics should be used to compare the current and planned system peak loads. In order to be sure and confident, it’s important to contact the web hosting provider and confirm all the traffic limitations and upgrade the server if possible.

Auto-scaling of resources should be planned beforehand

Auto-scaling is able to handle the unexpected traffic spikes as this technique is used in cloud computing. Waiting until the influx of traffic causes hustle and crashes your website can make it worse. It is better to be ready for the worst beforehand. With the auto scaling technique, number of virtual machines can be increased and then decreased after the requirement has been met.

Improve client-side performance and optimize speed

According to industry reports, the average time for a website to load is 3.9 seconds. Visitors get annoyed and leave the website if they have to wait for too long to see the discount offers. Therefore, it is important to optimize the website speed. This can be done by compressing the size of the CSS, compressing image size, and shortening the JavaScript.

Fortunately, there are various open source load testing tools that you can use to accelerate load time quickly:

This tool allows the testers to run a free website speed test from multiple locations around the world. Real browsers such as Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome, etc. can be used at real consumer connection speeds. This tool runs simple as well as complicated tests including video capturing, content blocking, multi-step transactions, and much more. This tool provides a complete diagnostic information including waterfall charts, resource loading, and page speed optimization.

Compressor.io is one of the most powerful online tools for compressing the size of the images whilst maintaining a high quality. What really impresses people, is the quality that remains the same before and after compression. After compression, the page starts to load quickly.

PageSpeed and YSlow are important as they help in identifying what exactly is slowing down the website and what can be done about it. The information presented in these tools are very clear and easy to understand for developers as well as non-developers. For every issue, there is a detailed explanation given which tells why it is important to make improvements and how would it benefit the website.

This tool allows to run the tests locally or as a service on the web. This tool is not just based on the URL that is provided as it has a crawler that identifies and analyzes all the pages that one might reach.

Conclusion

As we talk about the tools that can help in increasing the performance of your application during the big days, you might realize that very few days are left for Black Friday. Now, all you can do is rely on a renowned software testing company that has extensive experience in performance testing, and that can provide you with the best services in no time. At TestingXperts, we have expertise in pioneering performance engineering for leading e-commerce sites globally.

Do you have an e-commerce website / application? We can help you implement thorough performance testing to ensure you don’t lose business because of a poor web or application experience. Connect with us today!