A great way to make sure that your Web pages are loading easily and functioning properly under stress is to test your Website and individual Web pages under load. load testing helps establish a baseline for future testing, tuning, and determining compliance with performance goals and requirements.
What Is Web Load Testing?
It is the process of simulating the presence of users from various geographical locations on your Website to assess how it performs. Performance issues arise when any component of the Web infrastructure is stressed and cannot adapt under high user load. You need to perform load testing to find out how many concurrent visitors your site can serve at any given time.
Why Is Web Load Testing Important?
It gives you feedback on the performance of your Website to help you ensure that it's functioning optimally even when it is handling high traffic loads. This includes these steps:
- Identify customer-critical scenarios and paths through your Website.
- Identify how much workload to allocate to key scenarios.
- Identify key performance metrics and verify them against performance objectives.
- Design tests to simulate such as searching your product catalog or adding items to a shopping cart.
- Analyze data gathered during tests.
Advantages
As load testing increases on your Website, it testing identifies factors that can impact the performance of your site, especially those that can negatively affect a visitor's experience. Web load testing:
- Reduces the risk of downtime
- Improves deployment quality
- Identifies performance bottlenecks
- Provides performance statistics to guide developers
- Improves scalability of the Website and Web applications
- Minimizes risk related to performance requirements
- Increases customer satisfaction
Features of a Good Web Load Testing Tool
A good tool identifies performance issues on your Website and applications, under large-scale user stress scenarios, before they occur in an actual production environment. An efficient software should be:
- Global and robust. For large sites, it must be able to emulate millions of users.
- Realistic and flexible. It must provide realistic metrics on the functioning of the Website outside the firewall and be able to factor in the unpredictable nature of users on the Internet.
- Reliable. It must deliver consistent results, uncovering even tiny performance problems.
- Comprehensive. It must provide realistic browser support so that it can test applications written using AJAX, Flash, XML, JavaScript, and other tools across widely used browsers.
Testing helps you identify the maximum operating capacity of your site or application, and in turn allows you to locate bottlenecks that could interfere with the optimal functioning of your Website. Most Web load testing software must be installed, configured, and test-run on your infrastructure - tasks that can be both time consuming and expensive.