First let’s take a look at how load testing can benefit your business as a whole.
What Load Testing Is
A slow-loading website is a customer’s worst nightmare. It can drastically influence their opinion of your business in a matter of seconds. To avoid costly performance degradation, a website needs to be load tested regularly.
“Load Testing is a non-functional software testing process in which the performance of software application is tested under a specific expected load. It determines how the software application behaves while being accessed by multiple users simultaneously. The goal of Load Testing is to improve performance bottlenecks and to ensure stability and smooth functioning of software application before deployment.”
– guru99.com
A properly tested and developed website will perform under the stress of increased load. A fast, performative website ready to handle many users at once will engender a positive reputation for your business, which in turn can help turn your small business into a big one and a big one into a giant.
The Effects of Load Testing on Your Website
A website can suffer slow performance and even downtime if it hasn’t been tested for bugs and errors. A load testing tool like ours at LoadView helps you to assess the function of your website under heavy loads and give you an overview of what functions operate negatively under such conditions.
Load testing should be performed regularly as part of a website’s development process, and also on special occasions. For example, eCommerce websites should be tested before a major sales event like Black Friday.
“Consumers spent a record $9.12 billion online shopping during Black Friday this year, according to Adobe, which tracks sales on retailers’ websites.”
– CNBC
If you’re responsible for an eCommerce website and have a sale planned, load testing needs to be part of your toolkit in order to understand just how much traffic your site can handle. Proper load testing will also give you insights into how your development team can improve the site for existing and anticipated users.
How Load Testing Helps Developers
All software is sensitive to changes in code or the conditions of the hardware on which it runs. A very heavy load on a website can make it malfunction and stop serving users at critical moments. Therefore, it’s necessary for you to test it beforehand using a load testing platform so that you can get an idea of how much load your website can take and what needs to be done to increase its capacity.
Our load testing tools at LoadView allows you to see realistic results that enable you to make accurate business projections. Our platform’s ability to emulate real user behavior through real browsers makes LoadView’s results especially true to real conditions.
We also make load testing easy for both technical and non-technical users. With our EveryStep Recorder, you can record real user behavior to generate test scripts that simulate complex user behavior like logging in and a complete eCommerce experience, from shopping to adding to cart to checking out.
Let’s look at Amazon’s load testing platform and see how it compares.
AWS Load Testing Services
With Amazon’s large user base and the complexities that result from it came the need for the advent of a load testing tool that could simulate thousands of users from different servers. Just like any other, AWS load testing services are meant to deliver reports on the performance of websites and web applications.
“The Distributed Load Testing on AWS solution automates software applications testing at scale and at load to help you identify potential performance issues before their release. It creates and simulates thousands of connected users generating transactional records at a constant pace without the need to provision servers. The solution also allows you to run tests across multiple AWS Regions.”
– Amazon
The AWS load testing platform allows you to access data from past test runs to allow you to project how many users you should test your website with. This comes as an added benefit because it may be difficult to start load testing if you don’t have an idea of how many users you anticipate coming to your website. That said, your developers should have an idea of your website’s average ongoing load, and/or this data can be gathered with a common tool like Google Analytics.
Knowing how much traffic your site currently receives is critical in order to accurately load test for anticipated surges in traffic. If you expect a 300% surge from current traffic on Black Friday, for example, you can test accordingly based on existing traffic on a normal Friday.
Features of AWS Load Testing Services
Here are a few features of AWS’ load testing services:
- You have the ability to schedule tests for the present or future.
- It offers the flexibility to test with basic HTTP scripts or more advanced scripts with JMeter that can be integrated into AWS’s system.
- You can set parameters for number of launched tasks and number of users per task
- You can simultaneously start multiple tests.
- Because the endpoint receives traffic at the same time, real-world scenarios can be emulated.
LoadView vs. AWS Load Testing Services
LoadView stands out from AWS Load Testing in a number of ways. At LoadView, we make it easy to create test scripts off of real user behaviors with our EveryStep Recorder. There’s no need to script complex behaviors by hand. Our EveryStep recorder is a point and click tool, so you simply record the behavior you’d like to test – it’s as easy as browsing your website like you normally would. Just record your interactions and run complex tests in minutes, not hours.
With AWS, you’ll still have to write your own scripts, which requires expertise, time, and resources. This can become incredibly taxing when you consider load testing should be a regular part of your development process. You and your team’s time is better spent developing your website based on the accurate results you receive from LoadView’s load testing tools.
Use LoadView for Professional Load Testing
At LoadView, we aim to make the load testing process as easy for you as possible. Our user-friendly dashboard, industry-leading results, and expert support make us the stand-out alternative to AWS Load Testing. While AWS can provide you with large scale tests and emulate real user behavior, its complex script making procedure is a major drawback in comparison.
AWS is also an institutional behemoth serving countless users across verticals, whereas at LoadView we are entirely devoted to load and performance testing. We work tirelessly to make load testing efficient and useful for our clients, with reports that lead to actionable insights for developers so they can improve websites and web applications for their users.
We are your dedicated partner for all things load testing. Register for a free LoadView trial and start testing in minutes. Our expert team is available to support all your load testing goals.