MOST PROFITABLE BUSINESS IS WHAT YOU ARE GOING TO MAKE DURING THIS HOLIDAY SEASON WITH PERFORMANCE TESTING

There is a huge scope for businesses to become profitable during a holiday season. A lot of survey reports and research studies conclude the fact that there is a static growth of 30% more than the regular revenue for online retailers when compared to non-holiday months, not only this but you can observe the revenue generation that takes place from black Friday to Christmas.

Being aware of this fact as an opportunity, online stores and retailers still loses hundreds of thousands of dollars just because of a missed sale due to website’s performance, and this results into customers dissatisfaction, frustration and loss of trust. All these happen because of unpreparedness of your website for different variations of traffic during holiday sale rush.

FUNDAMENTAL MISTAKES SHOULD BE ANALYZED BY RETAILERS

Retailers make mistakes while planning for holiday season; they take it as a special sprint- a one off event. They show a blind eye for their website throughout, it is seen that the most successful retailers apply right approach towards testing their website or apps for performance, functionality and security. They implement strategy where they employ software testing throughout the year, both during holiday and non-holiday seasons. For a continuous approach like this, it is easy to handle spikes or other variations in traffic without any hassle.

A continuous software testing approach around the year actsas an important role to minimize the issues that your website is going to face during holidays. The digital world in which we are living is unpredictable, therefore you should not be relaxed until the holiday season arrives as you won’t be even aware of what is going to happen, your calculation can push your websites performance downwards.

All those promotions, deals and discounts you promote aggressively both online and offline will increase the traffic more than usual during non-holiday season. If one of your competitors’ website suffers an outage, then there is a higher chance of that flock shifting to your website. This will lead to an unprecedented traffic to your website; and if you are not ready, then there are higher chances of you suffering a web failure, which will result your visitors divert to your another competitor who might be able to handle all that traffic being prepared well andbecomes winner of holiday season.

Therefore, it becomes an important aspect for you to have continuous software testing around the year to stand strong in holiday season.

PERFORMANCE TESTING IN A CONTINUOUS TEST STRATEGY IS WHAT THAT CAN HELP YOU TO SAIL ACROSS THROUGH THIS DIGITAL OCEAN

Holiday brings lots of excitement for entire world; it changes the monotonous routine entirely. Holiday means lots of shopping, but now it has transformed completely, shopping now means digital shopping or online shopping which always make your customers fall for it with the alluring discounts that tempts almost everyone. That spike in traffic is seen by the wide difference every year.

If you have come to a few predictions by analyzing previous years’ holiday traffic, then there is a possibility of your predictions to go wrong. Therefore, online retailers should be prepared for the unexpected.

For any seller or website, it is majorly observed that promotions offering discounts and holiday seasonal deals result in attracting good traffic. Your website or mobile app should have user satisfying performance; otherwise your valuable time and effort spent on promotions goes in vain.

How do you empower your website or mobile app with performance?

• Test, test and test, and a number of consecutive performance tests throughout the year is the only way to determine the overall performance of your website or mobile app, and it also gives the time to fix the performance issues, and make you ready for the holiday season.
• By taking proper care of certain important components like Database and SQL you can empower the infrastructure and applications and add value to your business.
• By embedding performance testing in a continuous test strategy, you can know the underneath situations, a proper introduction and importance along with required information during Holiday season.

“So, the need of Performance Testing is Clear,and Retailers need to Focus on Continued and Comprehensive Performance Testing Implementation”

MAKING PERFORMANCE TESTING AND TEST ENVIRONMENT WORK TOGETHER FOR YOUR APPLICATION PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT

Performance Testing is performed with an amalgamation of a wide range of techniques and methodologies, and also by leveraging different technologies. Unlike functional testing, Performance Testing result varies with environment in which the application under test undergoes Performance Testing. For more accurate Performance Test results, running performance tests in a production like test environment is ideal.

What would be the result of Performance Testing in a scaled down environment

Most of the organizations perform Performance Testing in an environment which is smaller compared to production. This is the approach that organizations consider due to their budget limitations, and it is based on simple calculations in which they multiply infrastructure double or triple or more by just benchmarking infrastructure required for a certain concurrent user load.

Though this approach is still convincing but in real time these simple calculations won’t deliver what it should. These organizations should realize the fact that infrastructure just doesn’t mean servers, an application’s supported infrastructure other than both web servers and app servers include various components such as bandwidth, caches, CDNs, etc. Each of these components will result impact when scaled down in a test environment for testing purposes.

Furthermore, performance test results in a not production like test environment won’t produce qualitative estimations whether to scale up with processing capacity or memory or scale out to generate combined computing power.

Tips to setup for an effectual Production like Test Environment

Now, it is evident that Production like Test Environment is essential for insightful performance test results, and here are a few aspects to keep in mind while setting up:

• Create test environment with the same server architecture as production environment
• Ensure test environment with the same system network infrastructure as production environment
• Test environment should run on the same level of bandwidth as production
• Implement load balancing in test environment if production environment has

“For More Accurate Test Results and Insights, Performance Testing should be done in a Test Environment that’s closer to Production”

Any website or mobile app that represents a retailer is regarded as a good performing when it handles adversities during business peak hours or season. Main elements like scalability, reliability, and elasticity are tested on the basis of load created due to increase in number of visitors. To perform a result-oriented performance testing, you need a reliable and trusted partner.

WITH COMPREHENSIVE PERFORMANCE TESTING SERVICES, CLICQA EMPOWERS YOU TO BE A WINNER IN HOLIDAY SEASON

We at ClicQA understand retailers’ pain during a holiday season, as it brings both business opportunities and nightmares. With several years of experience in different facets of Performance Testing and Performance Engineering, we empower your website and mobile app to perform at its best all traffic levels. We differentiate ourselves with the expertise in leveraging various technologies and tool stack to do performance testing, monitoring and tuning.

ClicQA Implements a Comprehensive Load Testing Strategy

Whether it is for a peak holiday season or planning a big sales week, we recommend and implement a comprehensive load testing strategy in a production like test environment. Having a complement understanding of your production environment that includes app servers, web servers, databases, CDNs, Caches, Bandwidth, etc., we will help in creating a replication of your production environment as is.

In the replicated production like test environment, we start load testing at a low concurrent user load, and gradually increase the user load in an incremental approach until the peak load. We will closely monitor the response rate and throughput to analyze response time and resources utilization. This way we will find out whether the response time is increasing with the user load gradually or all at sudden, and we do discover performance trend of your website or mobile app at all levels of user load – from low to peak.

By identifying where your website or mobile app suffers a sudden increase in response time with load testing, we empower you with reporting on performance bottlenecks or issuesat application level, server level and database levels. Bringing this kind of comprehensiveness to our load testing services, we will help retailers to emerge as a winner in the holiday season.

Finally, ClicQA helps you to learn more about your website or mobile app performance and provide recommendations for the best possible performance improvements, and also precautions against failure.

The final point to be made here is that you need to learn over time. Make you best attempt at testing, then when you go to production, monitor the actual live data. Learn how your assumptions in testing bear out in production. Then you can change your assumptions and, over time in a heuristic manner, your results will become more accurate.

For more information, you can reach us at [email protected]