For the longest time, Thanksgiving has been one of the most anticipated holidays in several countries like the United States. This is especially true for business owners looking to take advantage of consumers spending more on various goods and services during the season. Just last year, American shoppers spent more than $25 billion in online purchases during Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday, and this is expected to increase as digital shopping platforms continue to grow by next year.
The possibility of making a considerable profit should be more than enough for enterprises to ensure that their websites and applications are optimized for the influx of users pushing complex actions. Fully optimized systems allow organizations to provide their client base with dependable platforms where they can purchase goods, especially with most brick-and-mortar stores closed during the holidays.
Having a reliable system that users from different areas can use might look easy. However, several factors can negatively impact website performance, usually causing slow response times and possible website crashes. This can increase customer frustration, prompting them to look for other platforms to buy their desired items and services. Slow-loading and unresponsive websites can also significantly damage brand reputation and result in extensive financial loss.
A Statista survey showed that only around 16% of people are willing to wait up to 3 seconds for a page to load on their phones before they abandon it. Meanwhile, only around 26% of respondents are willing to wait up to 5 seconds for a page to load. This highlights the growing importance of mobile-friendly and optimized websites in the modern world since even a second delay can impact customer retention and engagement.
Website performance has become paramount in the modern business landscape, helping institutions become more competitive in their market. Investing in load testing can help guarantee the preparedness of websites and applications when dealing with peak loads during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
How Load Testing Helps
Load testing has been one of the most crucial parts of software development and performance engineering in recent decades, helping businesses assess the capacity of their systems when subject to heavy user loads. This is particularly helpful for companies that mainly depend on digital platforms to publicize their offerings, such as those in the e-commerce field. With load testing, e-commerce firms can adequately prepare their systems for superior performance.
Load tests are highly valuable for e-commerce websites and applications during shopping seasons, such as Thanksgiving. Most consumers usually have a complex purchasing journey, from signing in to browsing different products and shifting to different pages before checkout. This significantly impacts how the website will behave during peak hours and might lead to performance problems due to some underlying issues in the system.
The complicated nature of online shopping should be adequately simulated using scripts that imitate real-life scenarios way before the shopping season starts. Engineers should closely replicate actual usage patterns to see how the system will perform under real-world conditions. This will allow performance engineers to effectively identify possible bottlenecks in the design and work on necessary fixes if needed.
The Benefits of Load Testing During Thanksgiving
Identifying Potential Performance Issues
One of the prime benefits of load testing for the upcoming Thanksgiving shopping season is the opportunity to act on bottlenecks that can hinder a system’s capability to perform under specific loads. Load testing will help engineers determine the maximum load the software can handle, especially if users are expected to increase for various reasons.
Some possible issues that load testing can help uncover problems in the system’s code, such as unoptimized script and inefficient code structures.
Related: E-Commerce Application Testing for Black Friday & Holiday Shopping
Enhanced User Experience
With load testing, performance testers can help e-commerce companies provide the best possible shopping experience despite the heavy traffic. This can enhance user experience in several ways, including:
- Faster Page Load Times – Load testing can help identify pages or functions with slow response times so developers can optimize them. This is crucial to customer retention as they are more likely to stay on the site and complete transactions.
- Reduced Downtime – By addressing system bottlenecks, e-commerce websites can minimize downtime, especially during peak shopping periods, which usually causes customer trust and lost sales deterioration.
- Mobile User Experience – At least 55% of online sales during last year’s Thanksgiving were made using smartphones, so it is vital to have the systems optimized for all types of devices and screen sizes. Load testing helps developers guarantee that their websites and applications are honed to work on both PC and mobile environments, which can improve customer satisfaction.
Preparing for Traffic Spikes
Thousands of people flock to various e-commerce platforms during Black Friday and Cyber Monday to have a shopping spree, significantly affecting performance for an extensive period. Simulating this using a load testing tool can help e-commerce sites anticipate peak traffic and prepare their infrastructure if needed.
Based on the load test results, e-commerce companies can efficiently scale their infrastructure to handle the expected traffic spikes during the season. They will be able to add servers and optimize the web pages for higher traffic volumes before going live, mitigating possible issues during peak hours.
Conclusion
Preparing your software for the upcoming consumer rush should be a priority with Thanksgiving fast approaching. This enables you to have a reliable platform where people can buy your goods and services, giving you a significant advantage over market competitors.
Partnering with load-testing providers like Radview Software is a crucial approach to revamping your website or application, enabling you to identify bottlenecks even before the system goes live. Our flagship product, WebLOAD, is built to assist our customers in checking the capacity of their servers, providing detailed explanations of the results to avoid misinterpretations and costly mistakes.
To learn more about WebLOAD, get a demo now by visiting www.radview.com/schedule-demo.
Read More:
A Guide in Leveraging Raw Data for Precise Web App Performance Insights
How to Master Performance Testing with WebLOAD’s Data Drilling Feature
