As retailers prepare for a massive surge in traffic on their eCommerce sites during the back-to-school shopping season and the holidays around the corner, many are evaluating website performance through simulated spikes in user sessions. Load testing involves simulating a high number of users performing different actions on your site (browsing, adding to cart, checking out) to test how it will perform during unpredictable shifts in traffic. With load testing you can see how your website will perform under pressure and optimize performance before these peak seasons.
Why It Matters
Downtime is expensive, with research showing that the average cost of downtime per minute to around $9,000. A few years ago, Shopify experienced a 3.5-hour outage resulting in one seasonal retailer losing over 20k in revenue. In 2019, Facebook experienced an outage that lasted for 14 hours, resulting in losses of over $90 million. These are just some examples of what can happen when your servers are managing more requests than they can handle, so it’s important to make sure your site is ready before it’s too late. Beyond preventing your site from crashing, the following are some additional benefits of improving load times on your site for eCommerce conversion optimization.
The Benefits of Load Testing
- Improve the Customer Experience: Load times impact every step of the customer journey. Slow pages lead to abandoned carts, frustrated shoppers, and lost sales. Load testing helps you catch and resolve these issues before they affect real customers. An improved customer experience leaves customers feeling positively about your brand, so they’re more likely to return and purchase again.
- Lower Costs: Seasonal surges put strain on your infrastructure, especially if there are inefficiencies and unnecessary code clogging up your backend. Those hidden inefficiencies could be costing you money, as they consume valuable resources in addition to slowing down your page load times. Load testing isn’t just for eCommerce conversion optimization; it can help you uncover potential bottlenecks that are slowing you down and increasing overhead costs.
- Building Brand Reputation and Trust: An optimized eCommerce customer experience not only enables users to complete their transactions seamlessly, but it also encourages stronger relationships that foster a positive reputation for your brand. When customers have a good experience using your site, it increases your credibility and trust, so customers are more likely to return and recommend your products to their friends.
- Scalability: While load testing can ensure a smooth shopping experience for customers purchasing during seasonal surges, it can also help you prepare for long-term growth. Load testing can give you a better idea of how your site will perform during sustained increases in traffic, which can help you set yourself up for success beyond individual traffic spikes.
How to Combat Slow Loading Speeds
- Conduct a Site Audit: Start with a comprehensive site audit to assess every aspect of your eCommerce experience to gain a better understanding of where you can improve. Virid offers a free site assessment tool to evaluate your site for performance, accessibility, checkout optimization, and more. Request a site assessment from the Virid team to uncover your site’s potential and get ahead of the back-to-school rush.
- Implement Specialized Technology: To make things easier on your team, you can implement specialized tools for load testing so you don’t have to handle everything yourself. Tools like Microsoft Azure Load Testing, JMeter, and Gatling are all popular tools for developers to use to simulate large surges in user sessions. Alternatively, if you still want to conduct testing on your own, tools like Taurus help with automating test scripts that can be used in your load testing platform.
- Contact Payment Providers: Something to keep in mind as you begin running your tests is the impact hundreds or thousands of orders will have on your integrated systems. If you’re conducting load testing that involves real transactions, your payment providers may be impacted by the large quantity of payment processing requests. You may want to let your payment providers know beforehand if you plan to do this; they may even offer sample payment data for you to use in your tests.
- Configure a Mailbox for Email/SMS Communication: After each transaction, you likely have email or SMS communications released automatically to confirm the purchase or provide updates on shipping. Thousands of emails sent at once can trigger spam filters and even cause your account to be blacklisted from email providers. One way you can prepare for this is by setting up a catch-all email inbox for all of your test communication and configuring your email settings before running the test to avoid issues with your provider.
- Manage Inventory Automations and Integrations: If you plan to include real items in your test, you will need to make sure your supply chain isn’t impacted by the many fake orders suddenly coming in. Especially if you use automation tools throughout your fulfillment processes, you may even accidently order more stock to replenish the sold items if you don’t prepare your logistics technology for the test. You can combat this challenge by creating test products that won’t run out when thousands of them are purchased.
- Create Sufficient Data Stores: To run a successful load test, the most important step is gathering realistic data to create test scripts. Load tests consume a lot of data very quickly, so not only should you store realistic and high-quality data, but you’ll need a lot of it. For example, if you’re running a test that involves users entering their account information to log in to your site and track their order but you want to include a unique username and password combination for every user, depending on the duration of the test that can require a massive quantity of information.
Conclusion
Beyond load testing which tests your site in an environment with a significant increase in traffic, stress testing takes it to the next level. Stress testing intentionally puts beyond the maximum strain on your site to evaluate how your site will perform under extreme conditions. This can be an effective strategy for developers looking to determine how best to prepare for the worst-case scenario by intentionally pushing your site beyond its limits. Finally, if you’re looking to incorporate new technology to help you conduct load and stress testing on your site, you’ll need an eCommerce platform that’s highly connective to support you regardless of which tools you choose. Schedule a consultation today to learn about how Virid can help you grow.
