Why Website Performance Testing Is Required?

by Claire Mackerras Certified Software Tester

Web performance testing is the procedure of testing the speed and accuracy of web elements such as pages, images, and other file formats. A fully optimized website has many benefits like great user experience, higher ranking in the search results - which directly affect your traffic, more satisfied mobile users, etc. So, in order to achieve all these results, web performance testing is mandatory.

You hear a lot about testing web applications; however, you're yet uncertain, why you should invest additional money in doing this kind of work. How can it increase the value of your work? How might you encourage your customer or manager that it's a substantial utilization of time and cash?

There are a lot of reasons because of which performance testing is mandatory and a few of them are explained below:

Search Engine Optimization and Google

Since April 2010, Google began to take load time into account while ranking websites. Obviously, Google's calculations utilize various components to decide the ranking of websites in Google search result pages. Some of these elements are estimations of the validness of the site itself (age of the domain name, number and nature of links, and so on.) while others are identified with the substance of a website page itself (the content, its URL, the titles, headers, and so on).

After Google reported that they will consider the speed of the site too, it became a critical issue for site owners. Thus, enhancing the page load time is a powerful approach to enable users to get where they are going speedier. Therefore, as a site owner if you think about your Google positioning and you need to get more users from Google, website performance testing is mandatory.

User Satisfaction

It is realized that users just proceeds onward to some other web page if a site influences them to wait for a long time. Bouncing rate is a vital factor that each website admin should consider. It basically implies the percentage of visitors that enter the site and leaves immediately instead of staying on the site.

So, what is the time limit for a visitor to enjoyable hold up to load your site page? In the earlier years, it was considered 10 seconds, while some contended that most extreme load time should surpass 7seconds. Considering the technological advancement of today, a site with basic content should load within 2 seconds. Therefore, to enhance the user satisfaction, web performance testing is mandatory.

Mobile Users

One might say that usually, mobile clients are more patient than PC clients. The main reason behind this is that they are supposed to have slower web speed. Yet, at the same time, considering the present connection speeds, website load time is an essential factor.

Site owners should ensure that mobile sites load fast. You can take advantage of testing devices with a specific end goal to perceive how your site pages function in various stages.

Types of Performance Testing:

Load Testing

In this type of testing, the performance of an application is checked concerning its response to the client's request. The key considerations in this type of testing are:

What is the maximum load the application can hold?
Are there any system related issues to work upon?
How much information can the Database handle?

Worth Reading: [Why Website Load Testing is important for your applications and what is its future?]

2. Stress Testing

Stress testing is utilized to discover the approaches and break the system. The test additionally gives the idea of how much load the system can hold. The key considerations in this type of testing are:

What is the maximum load a system can bear before it fails?
Is the framework ready to recover once it's smashed?
In what number of ways a system can break and which are the feeble node while dealing with the unexpected load?

3. Volume Testing

Volume testing is to confirm that the execution of the application is not influenced by the volume of data that is being taken care of by the application. Keeping in mind the end goal to execute a volume test, a gigantic volume of data is inserted into the database. This test can be incremental or a consistent test. In the incremental test, the volume of data is expanded step-by-step.

4. Reliability/Recovery Testing

Reliability, dependability or recovery testing checks whether or not the application can return back to its normal state after a failure or a strange conduct and to what extent (or we can say, time estimation).

Note: It is likewise imperative to set a benchmark when you consider enhancing your site's execution. In case, you don't have a benchmark, you won't know how far you have to improve your site. So, you have to carry out testing procedure very carefully.

BugRaptors dedicated team of web test engineers possesses good experience and knowledge in web based application testing technologies. The experience has been generated while delivering various projects for clients in different parts of the globe.