How Load Testing Helps Websites on Black Friday
Black Friday is considered one of the most important business days of the holiday season. It is one of the busiest and most profitable days of the year for online retailers as consumers tend to do their shopping online because of the huge discounts online retailers provide.
Since 2013 there has been tremendous growth in online sales. In 2020, the total spendings of consumers only in the United States were approximately around US$9 billion. With online shopping growing in such leaps and bounds, it is essential for owners of online retailers and eCommerce sites to be well prepared for the increase in traffic that will occur on this day. Their websites will need to be fast, responsive, and secure so that the users won’t move on to shop on other sites. In this article, we discuss the importance of Black Friday and how ecommerce sites prepare themselves for the annual shopping event.
Importance of Black Friday
Since the last decade, Black Friday has emerged as an essential day in the United States and its neighboring countries. The day that was started as a day for shopping for particular items like smartphones, laptops, clothing, and accessories is now dedicated to shopping for anything and everything a person requires in their daily routine starting from groceries and medicines to electronic items.
However, since the pandemic started in 2020, most businesses have switched to selling products online resulting in huge competition. To gain the upper hand in this competition, these sellers provide discounts to attract more users to their sites and buy their products. Since Black Friday is one of those days where most families sit together and shop online, eCommerce websites offer huge discounts and cashback for users to prevent them from switching to other competitor sites. Since all the sites offer great deals to their users during this period, consumers tend to keep checking on multiple sites and buy the products from the site that gives more discounts.
The time between the user adding their products to the cart and making their payment is very crucial for retailers. This process has to be easy and smooth without any hassles and loading issues, otherwise, users are likely to move on to some other site that offers them similar lucrative discounts.
So, to prepare for the biggest sales event and keep their sites responsive and interactive online, retailers do load testing using tools like Jmeter before their sale starts so that the users won’t get frustrated and switch to other sites. Jmeter testing allows websites to check how much load their site can take without compromising on performance and whether it is ready for the anticipated load increase.
Load Testing
Load testing is a testing process usually performed to test a websites under a specific load. It determines how the website or application would behave if multiple users try to access it simultaneously. The main aim of doing load testing is to improve performance and ensure smooth functioning of the website.
Load testing helps determine the performance of the system along with the performance of the database under different loads. It also helps determine the response time for the transactions that have to be done on the website or application, delay in network communication between the client and the server, application design and server configuration issues.
Further, load testing helps developers easily analyze resource utilization levels, hardware performance, concurrency issues, load balancer performance, design flaws, software errors under different loads, and throughput rates that are required to support the application during peak conditions. It also helps developers identify issues like system lags, slow loading of web pages, and crashes during times of high traffic.
The Load Testing Process
The process of testing the application starts with identifying the objectives of the application and then the developers select an appropriate load testing tool based on the objectives of the application. Different tools are available to simulate the real-time scenario during the testing process, Jmeter is one of the tools that is used to do the load testing that is open source, globally scalable, and easy to run.
Once the tool has been finalized, it is important to determine the scope and volume that the application should have, and the crucial functions that the application should have like the response time, the maximum user load, and resource utilization should be identified as these will help during the testing process.
Once all the factors had been identified, the next step is to outline the journey of the user while they are interacting with the application. It is also important to monitor the data using different application performance monitoring tools as it helps to focus on key processes and metrics while the test is running. After finalizing all the key factors the testing tool can be run over the application to ensure its proper functioning during the critical time.
Conclusion
Black Friday being an important day of the shopping season and causing an exponential rise in online transactions in the last decade, websites need to be fast and responsive as it directly results in higher revenue. To avoid unexpected crashes and slow loading of the page which might frustrate users and lead them to abandoning the site and moving to another site to shop, it is necessary for online retailers and eCommerce sites to be ready for unexpected situations by performing load testing and fixing issues in the system before they hinder business prosects.
