Table of Content
- Why Performance Testing is Crucial for Black Friday Sales?
- Prepare for Black Friday Website Downtime
- Testing Website Black Friday Readiness
- Why Partner with Tx to Make your Website Ready for Black Friday?
- Summary
Black Friday is that time of the year when everyone is looking for the best discount deals (offline and online) and wants to get their hands on the most awaited items. The eCommerce market is especially packed with users visiting their favorite brand’s sites to grab the best deals on their favorite products. This causes a heavy traffic rate, causing website slowdown and downtime issues, affecting the website’s performance and leading to a bad user experience. One thing is certain, though, whether offline or online, Black Friday sales always take the market like a storm. Well, for the online part, performance testing can assist with making eCommerce websites ready for Black Friday sales.
In 2023, Black Friday online sales grew 8% year-over-year (YoY) to $70.9 billion globally and 9% YoY, reaching $16.4 billion in the US alone. With the expectations of having a high revenue collection during this holiday season, one simply cannot risk having their eCommerce stores crash, slow down, or go through downtime.
Why Performance Testing is Crucial for Black Friday Sales?
If the website hasn’t gone through proper performance and load checks, it will cause issues for online users when they visit online stores for the best prices. Unresponsive, buggy, and slow websites will frustrate users, and they will leave the store, resulting in user and revenue losses. In addition, it will also harm the brand’s reputation. A similar incident happened in 2022 when Nike, a renowned sportswear brand, encountered a situation where its users couldn’t access the website on Black Friday. The website faced downtime issues, frustrating the users, who had to look for alternatives.
According to statistics, around 50% of visitors expect the website to load in 2 seconds, and 30% want the website to load in 1 second. They will feel disappointed when their requirements are not met and will move to a different website. Around 22% of them will not come back ever again. Around 75% of mobile and tablet users will not even visit a retailer’s app or website if it’s buggy, crashes frequently, and is slow to load.
To avoid user discontent on Black Friday, businesses should start fixing and optimizing the performance of their websites and mobile applications. The best way to do that is by conducting thorough performance testing for every component that affects UX.
Prepare for Black Friday Website Downtime
Websites and apps often fail during the holiday season. Online shoppers want to spend their time and money on the best deals, but if the website or app fails to handle the massive traffic or load, the result will not be good. As one of the biggest retail mega holidays is approaching, businesses must prepare themselves with more robust performance testing. Here are some of the ways performance tests can assist in preparing for Black Friday website downtime:
- Analyze performance metrics to identify whether the website or app performs as expected during functional testing. The shift left approach should be adopted to determine application behavior. Also, identify the server’s current load-handling capacity.
- Utilize real data collected from last year’s Black Friday sales during peak hours or traffic and apply it to the current year’s projections.
- Continuously run load tests, simultaneously increase the load to simulate the expected traffic, and analyze and monitor the response time and throughput rate. Repeat this until website stability becomes an issue. Run a series of load tests to determine the server usage patterns.
- Use different devices to run load tests, as one cannot expect high traffic from a single source. Users use various devices to shop, so it is common knowledge to utilize multiple devices like laptops, tablets, and smartphones.
- Analyze and review the performance results, identify bottlenecks, and implement the suggested improvements to adjust the website’s performance.
It could be risky to leave website performance testing until before Black Friday sales or until a user complains about slowness or downtime. Businesses should understand that performance issues take time to resolve. So, fix them beforehand instead of leaving them for the last few days before the peak period.
Testing Website Black Friday Readiness
Black Friday is a double-edged sword. If it promises an abundance of sales, it also pays off with website downtime or meltdowns due to heavy traffic. However, by partnering with a reliable QA services provider and proper preparations, businesses can ensure their site’s robustness to deliver exceptional UX. Let’s take a look at some key pointers to ensure the website’s readiness this Black Friday sales season:
Load and Stress Testing:
Knowing whether the site can handle the rush is crucial. Load and stress tests simulate real-world scenarios by injecting a large amount of user access into the website. Businesses can use existing traffic data to set a load and stress testing baseline. It will give insights into how the server, database, and other backend systems perform under pressure. After running the tests, analyze the results to pinpoint the weak areas (server resource exhaustion, database slowdowns, payment security issues, etc.). After identifying the improvement areas, businesses and their QA partner can work on performance optimizations, like code refactoring, database optimization, server upgrades, etc.
Endurance Testing:
There will be a tremendous load on Black Friday. Knowing how a website will perform under such conditions is very important. Endurance testing will evaluate how well an eCommerce store can perform under a sustained high load. It will determine whether the store can handle increased traffic without affecting user experience.
UX Testing:
Even if a website is technically perfect, it would mean nothing if it were hard to navigate for users. This is why user experience testing is important, ensuring the site’s navigation is intuitive. By running A/B tests with different menus and layouts, teams can identify which one will fit best with every user. Also, the search functionality must return results accurately and faster. Using filters and auto-suggestions will allow users to find what they are looking for easily. Perform thorough testing of the checkout process and take feedback for any issues real users encounter.
Promo Codes and Discounts Testing:
Black Friday’s other name is Discounts and Deals. Businesses should test the checkout page to ensure the promo codes and discounts work as intended. This will help avoid sales disruption, user frustration, and transaction failures.
Multi-device Testing:
Nowadays, users use multiple devices to shop online during the holiday season. Testing the website and app across multiple devices (smartphones, laptops, and PCs), OS, and browsers will ensure the site displays and performs as expected for every shopper.
Shopping Cart Testing:
Issues such as the broken “Add to Cart” feature can negatively impact customer conversion rate. This is why every step of the user’s shopping journey should be thoroughly tested, from searching for items to adding them to the cart to completing the purchase. This will also prevent cart errors from hampering shoppers’ purchases.
Updates Testing:
Websites and apps receive updates before the Black Friday sale. New links, banners, color schemes, pages, and other elements are added to attract online shoppers. This is why testing new functionalities before going live is crucial. Failure to do so will make it harder to provide quality UX.
Why Partner with Tx to Make your Website Ready for Black Friday?
In the chaos of Black Friday sales, customers prefer businesses that offer reliable and swift shopping experience. Black Friday sales can significantly boost your revenue, but only if your website can handle the horde of users without budging. You should leverage performance and load testing services to ensure optimal website performance under heavy loads during Black Friday. Partner with Tx to boost your website performance for the following reasons:
Performance Testing:
Our performance or load testing services will ensure your website or mobile app performs as expected under heavy load during Black Friday. We conduct different types of performance testing, such as stress testing, load testing, isolation testing, soak testing, and spike testing.
Real-time Monitoring:
Switch action significantly differs between temporary glitches and stretched downtime. We use cutting-edge tools to provide real-time analytics about your site’s performance. Our QA team is always ready to act if an anomaly (server issues, checkout glitches, inventory errors, etc.) is detected.
AI Chatbots Testing:
Utilizing AI-powered chatbots to handle bulk user queries can free up your support team for complex issues. Our AI chatbot testing solutions ensure seamless implementation within your website.
Security Testing:
During the Black Friday sales, the chances of cyberattacks will be much higher. Our security testing experts will assist you in delivering safe and secure UX and transactions to keep your brand image intact. In context of performance testing, we will also ensure your website/app can handle malicious attempts to break it while it’s under load.
Tx-PEARS:
Our in-house accelerator, Tx-PEARS, can assist with all non-functional testing requirements. It is a consolidated platform to perform security, performance, and accessibility testing, allowing you to deliver scalable, reliable, accessible, and robust apps to your end-users.
Summary
Black Friday 2024 is around the corner, and checking the preparedness of your websites and mobile apps is essential. Retailers and eCommerce businesses must leverage various software testing services to deliver a seamless UX and prepare for the upcoming Black Friday sales season. Partnering with Tx for performance testing helps safeguard your website’s reliability, ensuring it performs optimally during this peak shopping period. We offer comprehensive load testing, real-time monitoring, AI chatbot testing, and security assessments to maintain seamless UX. Our Tx-PEARS platform further enhances non-functional testing, providing robust and secure solutions to meet the demands of Black Friday sales. To know how Tx’s performance testing services can assist in resolving the website’s performance and downtime issues, contact our experts now.
