How Emphasis on load testing is important before marketing your website

One of the common mistakes that many organizations commit is the decision to launch their website before making it market-ready. It means they do not prepare their site to handle the challenges that a website might face during its launch. The challenges include choosing the service provider for hosting, making a website’s on-site copy, and qualifying SEO (search engine optimization) requirements. While focusing on these requirements, organizations tend to overlook performance issues (slow load time, response time and CPU saturation) that arise during an unexpected workload on their website.

Load testing is essential to handle these issues. During load testing, testers simulate a heavy load on a website and analyze its behaviour (speed, scalability, and stability). The performance metric derived from the load test helps the testing team to create a baseline for a website. It initiates an efficient testing process that gives the maximum benefit to an organization. Therefore, organizations should focus on load testing. 

Apart from making a website market-ready, other reasons to emphasize on load testing are:

1. Load testing reveals bottlenecks

Load testing helps organizations to find the performance bottlenecks of a website. By simulating real-time load on a website during a load test, testers compare its behaviour in the presence and absence of a heavy workload. It helps testers to analyze the behaviour of a website and examine its capacity to handle an unexpected workload. Load testing also reveals the hardware bottlenecks. It evaluates the maximum number of threads a system can run at a time. Assessing threads helps organizations to resolve potential hardware and VM problems. It provides better integration of hardware and software which increases the efficiency of the product. 

2. Load testing prevents revenue losses

After the identification of possible bottlenecks during load testing, organizations can resolve two potential issues (slow response time and system downtime) before the deployment of their website. It enables enterprises to avoid the loss of revenue that may occur when their website fails after the release.  Poor performance affects users’ experience and causes a deduction of the user base to organizations. Moreover, running the load test after the product release creates additional expenses that may affect an organization’s budget. Therefore, load testing eliminates revenue losses and helps organizations in maintaining their budget.

3. Load testing maintains the user base

During promotional events (festivals and national holidays), travel websites and e-commerce websites receive heavy traffic. Load testing analyzes a website’s capacity to handle many concurrent transactions. When testers discover deterioration in the website’s speed, scalability, and stability, they report it to the developers. It helps developers to fix those issues. A better experience makes the site reliable to users and retains the user base.

4. Load testing consolidates the database

Load testing enables organizations to choose an efficient database technology (Mongo and Redis). During load simulation, testers also check the database connectivity. They observe the response time of the database when a user sends a query (using MySQL or PHP). Organizations increase the scalability of their website by finding bottlenecks in the database. It provides resilience to their database because an unstable database may cause unforeseen data loss.

5. Load testing takes care of each sprint

Load testing allows testers to identify the effects due to change in the source code of the website. After every release, organizations perform regression testing. However, it only ensures that the new changes in the website do not affect its overall behavior. Load testing enables organizations to analyze the performance repercussions caused due to changes in the source code. It facilitates regression testing and helps the organization to achieve a faster time to market.   

6. Load testing provides customer satisfaction in agile

If an organization uses an agile methodology, it needs to ensure that the undergoing development and testing fulfil the requirements of the users (clients). With load testing, organizations can reveal the stability of their website. It makes the clients confident that they will get a quality website. The assurance keeps them satisfied and increases their trust towards the organization. 

Load testing ensures that the final website can retain a large user base. It helps organizations to release a quality website that satisfies numerous users and increase their reliability in the market. Therefore, organizations must carry out an efficient load testing effort before they market their website.