Black Friday is one the busiest shopping days of the year for e-commerce businesses. Preparing for the surge in web traffic is critical to ensure a smooth customer experience, as even a few seconds of downtime or slow loading speeds can lead to significant revenue loss. In this article, we’ll explore how your e-commerce company can effectively prepare for Black Friday by using load testing to optimize your website performance and look at an example of poor planning by other companies that didn’t prepare using load testing.
The Challenge
In most cases, we typically see online retailers generate a large portion of their annual revenue during the Black Friday weekend. In the past, these retailers experienced issues with their websites slowing down or even crashing due to overwhelming traffic spikes. Downtime is also a major problem to be aware of as this can cause a drop in conversions and can lead to frustrated customers, which ultimately causes lost revenue and damage to their brand reputation.
Normally, your goal for Black Friday and similar sales periods is to ensure that your website can handle at least 10 times the usual traffic while maintaining optimal speed and functionality. You also want to prevent potential bottlenecks in your system by being able to identify vulnerabilities well in advance.
A Real-Life Example: Walmart’s Black Friday 2020 Outage
No matter how small or big your business is, your website and user experience is always susceptible to technology issues and it’s important to be prepared. Even large retailers are not immune to the consequences of insufficient website preparation for Black Friday. In 2020, Walmart experienced significant website slowdowns and intermittent outages during their Black Friday sales due to the overwhelming traffic. With the surge of online shopping driven by COVID-19 at the time, Walmart’s website struggled to keep up with the increased demand.
Customers encountered error messages and were unable to browse or check out at peak shopping times, which led to widespread frustration. Shoppers then took to social media to blast Walmart with their dissatisfaction in missing out on deals due to the website’s performance issues.
Had Walmart performed thorough load testing and stress testing ahead of time to prepare, they could have potentially avoided these technical problems. By scaling their infrastructure and optimizing key functional pages (like their cart and checkout pages) for high traffic, they might have sustained the huge shopping surge without any significant disruptions.
Another Example from Our Client
After conducting several rounds of Black Friday load testing with LoadView, they have made the following improvements:
- 50% Faster Page Load Times: By identifying and optimizing slow-loading assets like images, scripts, and third-party plugins. They easily reduced the average load time on key pages by 50%.
- 100% Uptime During Peak Traffic: Load testing helped to ensure that their website stayed online even when traffic peaks at more than 10 times their normal traffic levels. This can typically be achieved through server optimizations and auto-scaling configurations that adjust server capacity in real-time.
- Optimized Checkout Process: By creating a smoother and faster checkout process, it helped reduce cart abandonment rates during high-traffic periods which contributed to a significant increase in overall sales.
The Solution to Black Friday Load Testing
To prepare for Black Friday, businesses often should turn to load testing as a key part of their performance testing strategy. Load testing simulates high-traffic conditions to assess how a website or application performs under stress. The gaol is to identify weak points, improve response times, and ensure the system can handle anticipated traffic surges.
The steps that you would typically take to load test and prepare for Black Friday are:
- Identify Critical Pages: Focus on key areas of your website such as the homepage, product pages, and the checkout process. These areas typically experience the most traffic and are critical to the sales funnel. Any slowdowns or disruptions here can lead to a higher card abandonment rate.
- Use Real Browser Load Testing: To accurately simulate real customer behaviors, tools like LoadView enable real browser-based load testing is used. This approach helps to mimic real interactions like product searches, adding items to the cart, or even completing purchases. Unlike protocol-based load testing, real browser testing helps to capture client-side rendering so that you can get the most insights possible to make improvements for your e-commerce websites.
- Scalable Testing: Load tests are run with traffic levels of up to 10 times the normal amount. You do this by gradually increasing the load so that your teams can easily identify when your website’s performance begins to degrade. This helps to pinpoint the weak spots such as slow database queries or underperforming server configurations.
- Cloud-Based Testing: Scalability tests ensure that cloud infrastructure can dynamically adjust to sudden spikes in traffic. These tests confirm that servers can scale up when needed, keeping the website stable even during traffic surges.
- Continuous Monitoring: Throughout testing, key performance metrics such as page load times, server response times, and error rates are closely monitored. This data helps identify areas of the site that require optimization, such as streamlining checkout processes or improving server response under heavy loads.
By taking these steps, businesses can proactively prepare their websites for the heavy traffic associated with events like Black Friday which helps to ensure optimal performance and reduce the risk of downtime or slowdowns during peak periods.
Conclusion
The importance of performance testing and load testing for businesses preparing for high-traffic events like Black Friday becomes even more crucial when you start to look at other failures and examples. By proactively testing the infrastructure and optimizing key parts of their website, our e-commerce client was able to avoid downtime, speed up page load times, and ultimately drive more conversions during this crucial shopping period.
The example of Walmart’s Black Friday 2020 outage shows that even industry giants are at risk when load testing is not prioritized. To prevent similar disruptions, investing in Black Friday load testing is essential for ensuring your website can handle traffic surges and deliver a seamless shopping experience.
If your e-commerce business is preparing for an event like Black Friday, load testing with LoadView could make the difference between record-breaking sales and costly website downtime. Using a tool like LoadView gives you access to the best features available on the market for load testing at a reasonable price. LoadView’s platform provides you with the performance insights needed to make the optimization changes easily so that you can focus on what you do best during Black Friday instead of having to worry about website performance.