Avoid a Black Friday & Cyber Monday Disaster With Performance Testing

It’s hard to believe, but Black Friday and Cyber Monday are looming just around the corner. With online shoppers frantically chasing the sales dragon, you better make sure your website is ready to perform to customer satisfaction. Failure to rise to the occasion means not only bad press for your organization, but also lost revenue and, worst, customer loyalty.

In fact, the proof is in the pudding – 75 percent of all shoppers and 81 percent of millennials report that if a mobile site or app is buggy, slow, or prone to crashes, they would abandon it and shop elsewhere, according to a Worldwide 2015 Consumer Mobile Holiday Shopping Survey.

These numbers go to show that digital performance has an immediate and lasting impact on business. With customers spending more than $1.4 billion, your business can’t afford to ignore these risks? Avoid such tragedies this Black Friday and Cyber Monday by ensuring your website is glitch free with performance testing.

It’s often the crucial days when our websites and apps fail us. Online shoppers have the time and money to kill, but your website or app just can’t handle the massive amount of traffic. It’s paramount that leading up to the two biggest retail mega holidays your backend team prepares with more robust performance testing.

Though it’s always safer to err on the side of caution and expect some type of disaster, here are a few ways performance testing can help you manage the unruliness:

• Review performance metrics to determine if your application performs as expected while running functional tests.
• Use realistic data – preferably data collected last year during peak volume – and apply it to this year’s projections.
• Run load tests continuously, while slowly increasing the load in order to simulate site traffic expected and monitor the response time and throughput rate. Carry on doing this until scalability becomes an issue.
• Run load tests from different devices – don’t expect traffic to come from just one source. Now and days, consumers shop from tablets and smartphones too, not just laptops.
• Analyze performance results from your performance tests, identify bottlenecks and make the required changes to adjust for what’s to come.
• Test, test and test again!

So, what’s the takeaway here? Well, if you have to ask then you haven’t been paying attention. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are just days away. It’s time to kick-start performance testing and prepare your backend for the mad rush that is about to come. Don’t be afraid to push your website and applications to the max. Run continuous load tests and stress tests, monitor performance when under peak conditions, make the adjustments, and then test, test and test again!