Performance tests show how a system behaves and reacts in different settings. A system can run extremely well with just 1,000 simultaneous users, but then how would it perform with 100,000? With regards to performance, we expect to accomplish superior speed, scalability, and stability of the system. There are numerous types of performance tests in which each replicates a different feasible user scenario. Here are a few important goals of best performance testing software
1. Page Speed – Users want pages to load as fast as possible and when they do not, they are disappointed and unsatisfied. Users can also experience heightened levels of stress and feel annoyed when pages take too much time to load. For instance, when the website is behaving erratically or taking forever to load during the middle of a monetary or banking transaction, users may become irritated and lose confidence. Speculating whether the payment went through or not does not make for a satisfying shopping experience. As per a Harris 2015 poll, nearly 46% shoppers have stated that they will in no way return to a slow site.
Even though your web page is loading at a satisfactory rate, users see load times as slower than they are. A misunderstanding of time makes us even more anxious.
Hence, decreasing load time is important, even if on paper it loads rapidly, it may not be felt that way.
One more reason to be concerned about page speed is due to the grand decider of a website’s future, Google, which supports faster websites. Its algorithm enables page speed for both, web and mobile browsing. It is Google’s world, and it is essential to play by its rules to be present at the top of its search results.
Most significantly, the quicker the website, the more revenue it will generate.
Websites that load quickest have a competitive advantage over others. As everything on the internet is just a click away, it is crucial to have quick load times to engage customers on your site and not your competitor’s. According to one Executive VP of Technology and Research, Microsoft 250 milliseconds, either slower or faster, is close to the miraculous number for competitive advantage on the Web.
Below are a few real-time instances of positive results due to improvements in page speed-
a. Walmart lagged its competitors online till they made enhancements. For every one second of upgrading to load time, the site faced up to a 2% progress in conversion rate.
b. Intuit reduced load time in half and noticed a growth of about 14% in conversions.
c. GQ lessened its average load time from 7 to 2 seconds and noticed a growth of 83% in traffic.
2. Scalability – Scalability is one more important factor to gage the performance of a website. Scalability tests are very important if you expect a large number of users to interact with the system. It is important to know the number of additional users you can support if you add another CPU to the database server, and time required for page loading prior to this addition, etc.
3. Stability – You want your application to work always. Sometimes it is under greater stress compared to others. For instance, Black Friday is not when you expect your e-commerce website to collapse. For renowned companies, even a few minutes of downtime can be extremely costly and can turn out to be big news.
Cases like these are the reason why stress testing is particularly important. It is essentially important to know the number of users you can handle until the system breaks with its current infrastructure and the cost you can face if you are not aware of the number of users your system can handle.
4. Test Performance Early – Briefly described, performance testing software should be a key priority before publishing any software. It must be executed early on during development in order to find more bugs in advance and enhance user satisfaction while enabling saving your time and money down the line.