Black Friday Is Approaching. Are You Prepared

Summer seems to be ending very quickly and the big sale days are fast approaching. Are you sure your website can handle an unanticipated load? Sometimes, the application is not able to withstand the sudden influx of users and before you know it, either the website servers are down, or the payment gateway crashes. This negligence can end up having an adverse impact on the brand.

There are many renowned e-commerce companies that have faced this distress and have had a major setback during Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale. Taking into consideration the previous years’ statistics, performance testing companies has to be more robust for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. In this infographic, we will discuss some tips to ensure a great application/website’s performance for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

If we look at last year’s online sale, consumers spent a total of $12.8 billion from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday. According to Adobe Digital’s statistics, a total of $3.34 billion was spent only on Black Friday.

Here are tips to ensure a consistent application/website’s performance for Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Plan the tests in advance

Execution of performance tests should not be done just a few days or a week before going into production, as it takes a lot of time to resolve issues. Planning of tests should be done soon after defining the performance benchmarks.

Move to the cloud

Increasing the infrastructure could be a temporary solution to prepare for times when the expected user load becomes much larger than it usually is throughout the year. Moving to the cloud can make this task easier to perform, especially for small-scale businesses.

Perform proper load tests

It is logical to test the performance of the application on the infrastructure of your choice. Performing proper load tests can make it easier to find the breaking point of the system and thereby understand the estimated load that the website can handle. A robust load testing strategy can help in ensuring that the application / website that can handle the anticipated load. To estimate the expected traffic, trends from the previous year and the changes in traffic over the last few months should be taken into consideration.

Select the perfect load testing tools

There are numerous tools available for load testing, such as JMeter, The Grinder, Locust, Gatling, and Selenium. A tool that fulfills all testing requirements should be considered.

 Run the tests

After analyzing the estimated load, final tests can be run in order to know when the system breaks and at what level it stops responding. Running the tests can eventually help in foreseeing the real-time traffic spikes that need to cope with.

Scan the results

Identify errors and bottlenecks and describe the solutions that are required to fix them. Dedicated technical resources should be allocated to this task. Identifying KPIs such as response time, latency, throughput, and connect time would be the best strategy to make the website error-free.

Run your tests yet again

After fixing all the bugs and after making necessary changes, servers should be ready. Adjustments in tests should be accordingly and run again to see whether the changes were able to enhance the system’s capabilities.