What Is Website Load Testing?
With tons of people using websites and software applications, the last thing they want to be met with is a slow website that doesn’t load fast enough. To help expose vulnerabilities and measure the maximum speed and capacity of the website, website load testing is essential.
To simplify things, it is a form of non-functional testing where one stimulates a scenario of multiple users accessing a software program simultaneously to understand how well the program performs. A crucial part of performance testing, it helps you evaluate and detect issues that are directly related to user load. Please keep reading to learn more about why it is necessary to conduct website load testing.
Benefits Of Website Load Testing
- Mimics real-user behavior
As already mentioned above, website load testing creates real-user simulations to check how your website performs under peak loads. Using this test, you can tell if your website can handle thousands of active and functional users. Not only will it test the loading speed of the page, but it will also detect any errors, bugs, bottlenecks, and problems that may arise when so many users are active on your page.
- Improving scalability
With website load testing, you can estimate the scalability of your application as it helps to check how many concurrent users your website can support. After analyzing the test results, one can use additional resources to increase the bandwidth of users when there is an unexpected increase in traffic.
- Low downtime
When a website experiences errors, has trouble functioning effectively, and is not available online, it is called downtime. With website load testing you can prevent downtime as you are aware of how many users your website can handle and will be better prepared on days of high traffic like when your website offers sales.
- Identify ineffective code
Every time you make changes within your website code, the website performance is also affected. Website load testing along with open-source load test tools can help you check your website code after changes have been made, so the end product is not altered negatively.
Besides this, if your product has a complexly written code, you can identify the problems that may come along with it using load testing.
- Minimizes cost loss
While running automated load tests may seem like they are expensive and time-consuming, they actually save you from spending a lot in the long run. Downtime and crashed websites are not only expensive to fix but also result in low customer satisfaction, making your users go to other websites and take their business there as well, costing you financially. Hence, regular load tests ensure your website performs efficiently, helping you save costs.
To deliver superior customer satisfaction by ensuring that your website is always up and running, you must conduct regular and effective load tests. This helps with future-proofing your website and helping your users seamlessly use your website without the interruption of slow-loading web pages or errors.
