Ensuring that customers and other visitors to your website have a positive and fruitful experience is vital to maintaining a well-run and profitable business. A website performance analysis is an essential element for the financial success of a business. A poor-performing website can lead to significant profit loss and other negative ramifications, such as loss of reputation and potential legal issues.
Conducting performance tests is essential for understanding how users experience browsing on your site. As a marketer, you of course want users to love your content, share it, download it, etc. If your site is slow or difficult to navigate, users will be clicking away from your site so fast that they won’t even have a chance to read your content.
Poor site performance often goes hand-in-hand with poor user experience, and poor user experience is the quickest path to lost revenue. Below, you’ll find a list of some helpful website performance analysis tests you can conduct to determine how strong your web performance is. Remember, web performance can be directly related to marketing efforts, so discovering areas of improvement from a web performance perspective means you are also identifying where users may be dropping off in your marketing strategy.
Website Performance Analysis Tests
Volume Testing: This test will verify whether the performance of the website is affected by the volume of data that it’s handling. In order to execute a volume test, an enormous amount of data is usually entered into the database. You can perform this test as either a steady or incremental test.
Capacity Testing: This test is utilized to determine how many transactions or users the website can support while still meeting performance standards.
Load Testing: (Not to be confusing with load time/speed testing) In this test, a website is tested for normal and peak usage performance quality. The website’s performance is tested with regard to its response to a user request and the ability for it to respond consistently within an accepted tolerance on varying user loads.
Reliability/Recovery: This form of testing is used to verify whether a website has the capability of returning back to its normal state after a failure or abnormality. It also tests how long it takes the website to return to its normal state.
Stress Testing: This test finds ways to break the system. It also gives you an understanding of the maximum load that the system can hold. This test will check the functionality of the website. while it is tested under heavy load, which on the back end may be running complex queries.
Next Steps
- Use the above tests to determine where the performance weaknesses are in your system.
- Make sure that your website’s front-end operations, such as responsiveness, speed, and reliability, and back-end operations, such as query time, are performing at maximum capacity.
- Set up your website to ensure that it can handle a large volume of traffic and different types of traffic.
- Locate website and application bottlenecks.
- Final step: Get started “fixing” the areas of improvement that you identified.
Conclusion
As consumers now have seemingly limitless options on the internet, it is more important than ever to make sure your website is working at full capacity and to its full potential. A fully-optimized website will certainly enhance your marketing efforts due to the ease of use of your website. A reliable website that is performing fast will also help increase your website’s conversion rates and search engine ranking.
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Sources: Forbes, Software Testing Help