There are many opportunities to start up a successful business on the internet. There are brilliant entrepreneurs who have started their website right out of their own home and have found great rewards creating the business. With great website success can come immediate failure if the site cannot handle all the buyers coming to visit. If you are such a web entrepreneur, then you should learn about load testing.
It is imperative for a web business to ensure no problems will occur when the business is launched and as it grows. Load tests must be performed on the website to make sure it is ready for success. The following description is an introduction that should help entrepreneurs and beginners to load testing understand the what's and why's of this important testing process.
What is Load Testing?
Load testing is a common term used in software engineering whereby an application is stressed with simulated user input to predict the performance of the system. On a website, a load test simulates peak user time and high concentration of traffic on the site (“heavy load”). It answers the question, “How does my website hold up to a bunch of users clicking around at the same time.
The outcome of load testing is to evaluate the response of the server and the software to the large amount of volume. Ultimately, you want to ensure whatever website you have created does not crash or error out when there is large amounts of traffic on the site.
Measurements such as the average response time of page hits are captured in reports and graphs to understand the performance of the website during the load test. Is it responding quickly? Does it slow down as more users hit the website? Some other important measurements are how many page hits per second or minute, how much bandwidth is consumed, and what errors are being received from the web server.
Why Should Someone Do Load Testing?
If you are wondering if it is important to test your website, the answer is “Absolutely!”. The necessity of load testing is obvious when you consider the potential loss of money when a website crashes. People come to buy, but the site is down, so no buying – revenue is gone.
Less obvious than a crash is how much money is lost when a website runs slowly. Long response times make users dislike your site, and they leave. People are getting more and more impatient. Their expectations for a fast website has gone down from 10 seconds two years ago to about 3 seconds now. Web Abandonment Happens After 3 Seconds by web performance experts StrangeLoop says it all. I recommend you invest time reading through StrangeLoop's site – it has plenty of good articles about website speed.
Another business aspect of load testing is to get into the good graces of the search engines. The search engines are critical to having a successful business on the web. When you are ranked higher or on the first page of a search engine, chances are you will have more users visiting the site. What does the search engine have to do with load testing? The search engines will rank websites on content, but it rates them higher or lower based on proper performance. Part of search engine optimization (SEO) is running the various load tests to guarantee the engines will rank the site higher. This is good for business because if your website lands on the first page of a search engine, you are great position to get plenty of visitors to the page (i.e. more buyers).
How to Load Test
When you are ready to move forward with a load test, you have many options to choose from. You will need a tool that can create simulated traffic coming to your website, and there are several websites that offer free analysis including load testing right from their homepage. Many of these tools are easy to use, but you will need some technical savvy.
You can find load testing tools through a search engine. Just type “load testing” into a search, you will get a listing of several sites offering this service. There are a few SaaS (software as a service) load testing applications that you should try. One of them is LoadStorm and has free load testing for as many test runs as you want, but it limits each run to 25 users. Others such as Keynote, Blazemeter, and BrowserMob give free trials.
All of these tools will provide good reporting such as plotting the user response times versus the amount of simulated clients active. Using the tool will take several minutes to connect to your server and run the scripts to simulate the high volume of user requests. I would recommend allocating at least an hour to try out a tool.
Another type of tool will perform a speed analysis of your site or a specific page, and they can provide a service that speeds up your site. These tools come under the category of “web performance optimization”. A couple of good places to look are Site Speed Optimizer and websiteoptimization.com. I already mentioned StrangLoop above, and they also provide an optimization service that you should try.
You have to enter in your website URL into the box and type in the security code to start the analysis. These sites have programs that check your website and can tunes it for peak performance to make the site run at the fastest possible speed.
Load Testing Summary
If you are just starting out with a new online business, you will need to ensure your website is going to run at peak performance when lots of customers show up to buy. It makes perfect sense to run load testing and optimization of the website as a preventative measure. Lags and long delays are very upsetting to the end user and they will leave.
An optimized website will eliminate this problem and perform properly. A faster website will directly impact your conversion rate and bottom line of the business.
In addition, an optimized website is ranked higher on the listings of search engines. When your website is found on the first or second page of a search, the visitor rate of traffic will naturally increase.
When you are ready to run the load tests, there are several options of tools you can choose from online. The only way you will really know if a tool is a fit for your website and your skill level is to try it out. With a free trial or a free account, you should be able to quickly setup and run a test.
Be sure to get started the right way by load testing your website before you launch your new business. A better performing site will make you more money.