It’s that time of the year again when consumers are waiting desperately for huge discounts on their favorite shopping items. Yes! The most awaited shopping days Black Friday and Cyber Monday are just around the corner. Not only physical shopping but online shopping has become a huge craze among people these days.
The online sale starts from Thanksgiving Day and ends on Cyber Monday. This is that time of the year when online shopping websites and applications make the most revenue. If we look at last year’s online sale, consumers spent a total of $12.8 billion from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday. According to Adobe Digital’s statistics, a total of $3.34 billion was spent only on Black Friday.
But, when too many of these enthusiastic shoppers flood your application/ website at the same time, it might just break, and unfortunately, this is exactly what happens every year to major online shopping websites / applications. This is a worse situation that can occur, as, on a day where the app should hold maximum customers, it loses them all, creating a chaotic situation. Performance testing process plays a important role here.
In this blog, we will discuss some tips to ensure application/website’s performance just in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Tips to ensure website performance for Black Friday and Cyber Monday
Plan the tests in advance
Execution of performance tests should not be done just a few days or week before going into production, as it takes a lot of time to resolve issues. Planning of tests should be done soon after defining the performance benchmarks.
Move to the cloud
Increasing the infrastructure could be a temporary solution to prepare for times when the expected user load becomes much larger than it usually is throughout the year. Moving to the cloud can make this task easier to perform, especially for small-scale businesses.
Perform proper load tests
It is logical to test the performance of application on the infrastructure of your choice. Performing proper load tests can make it easier to find breaking point of the system and thereby understand estimated load that the website can handle. A robust load testing strategy can help in ensuring that the application / website that can handle anticipated load. To estimate the expected traffic, trends from previous year, and the changes in traffic over the last few months should be taken into consideration.
Select the perfect load testing tools
There are numerous tools available for load testing, such as JMeter, The Grinder, Locust, Gatling, and Selenium. A tool that fulfills all testing requirements should be considered. There are several factors need to consider for selecting best load testing tool for your business needs.
Run the tests
After analyzing the estimated load, final tests can be run in order to know when the system breaks and at what level it stops responding. Running the tests can eventually help in foreseeing the real-time traffic spikes that needs to cope with.
Scan the results
Identify errors and bottlenecks and describe the solutions that are required to fix them. Dedicated technical resources should be allocated to this task. Identifying KPIs such as response time, latency, throughput, and connect time would be the best strategy to make the website error-free.
Run your tests yet again
After fixing all the bugs and after making necessary changes, servers should be ready. Adjustments in tests should be accordingly and run again to see whether the changes were able to enhance system’s capabilities.
After implementing these tips, your website / application would have no choice but to beat the Black Friday and Cyber Monday rush. TestingXperts’ proficient performance testing services have been helping its clients manage their web / mobile application performance challenges efficiently. With its vast industry experience and the best methodologies and approaches, it has become the best choice for the e-commerce companies to validate their critical web and mobile app issues. Reach out to us for the best performance testing practices during days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Read our next blog which has highlighted a list of tools that will help you optimize the performance of your website / application on Black Friday and Cyber Monday
