What Happens if Your Website Fails a Stress Test?

Let’s start from the beginning. Any website that expects a high traffic load with a planned or unplanned event should undergo performance testing. It is non-functional testing that is performed to determine the speed, stability, and scalability of the website and measure how the website/application behaves under heavy load. A stress test is performed by generating a high number of users, call load, and increasing it gradually to determine the website’s breaking point. A breaking point is where the website either crashes or the performance is degraded significantly. Unlike load testing, where the website is tested for a specific load, stress testing increases the load to figure out the website behavior under extreme conditions. It helps document the complete failure parameters and checks if the system can recover from the point of failure.

So what happens if your website fails a stress test and you do nothing about it? Let’s find out.

You’re Website Crashed, Now What?

In a real world scenario, if your website fails, it can severely impact your business and the user experience if you don’t optimize your website performance based on the data collected during stress testing. Here are a few major things that happen if your website crashes.

Inaccessible Website

During high traffic times, your website will become unavailable to existing users and new users. It might also happen that your internal website/applications are also linked with your website that failed the stress test, in such case, your internal business processes will also come to a halt, stopping your business.

Financial Losses

If you are running a festival sale and your website failed the Stress Test, your website might crash during the sales window if a large number of potential buyers come to your website looking for deals. If they cannot access your website, you will be looking at a huge revenue loss.

Brand Reputation

If people cannot access your website when they need it most, what happens? You damage your brand reputation. For example, if you are running a trading website and some news causes people to rush to your website to manage their stock portfolio. If they cannot access your website at that moment, people will lose their money, and you will severely damage your brand reputation.

Opportunity Loss

In this world of viral fame, you can’t afford to lose on capitalizing such an opportunity. If your website goes viral and heavy traffic comes to your website, your website crashes, and you will not be able to seize the opportunity. You can be at risk of losing your only chance to crack the market.

Regulatory Trouble

You might be bound to operate your website with high availability and reliability, but If your website fails a stress test, you are at regulatory risk. For example, if you are an exchange website and it is expected that you maintain high availability so that people don’t lose their money in an uncertain event. Failing to do so can attract hefty fines from authorities, and you might have to bear huge losses.

SLA Compliance Failure

If you have an SLA agreement between you and your clients that requires your website to be stable and operate at the expected speed, you need to have your website meet SLA at all times. If your website fails a Stress Test, that means you are at the potential risk of breaching the SLA agreement that can cost you your clients with a financial lawsuit.

What to do if Your Website Fails a Stress Test

To avoid the drastic consequences and business losses, here is what you should do if your website fails a stress test.

Load test your website for expected traffic, so you know your website’s capacity for normal functioning.
Repeat stress testing for your website with a more realistic environment in terms of browsers, devices, and multiple geo-locations to accurately identify breaking points.
Utilize stress testing reports to identify bottlenecks and defects and optimize for them.
Scale your system resources based on the insights from performance reports.

Apart from this, whenever you are releasing a new feature or update, always perform load testing and stress testing on the website against performance benchmark for speed and reliability.

Stress Testing With LoadView

As we have discussed, your stress test should use the most realistic situations to determine your website’s breaking point correctly. LoadView is a cloud-based performance testing solution that you can easily employ for load testing and stress testing. The following are some major features and advantages of using LoadView that makes it the best cloud-based load testing tool:

LoadView uses real browsers and devices to generate real-world load.
LoadView generates load from multiple geo-location to provide the most realistic scenarios for your Stress Test.
It’s EveryStep Web Recorder automatically creates test scripts using point-and-click technology and requires no programming language.
Adjust your load in real-time for more sophisticated scenarios.
Establish baseline response time for a specific load to fine-tune your performance and benchmarks.
Find the upper limits of different resources for capacity planning and scalability.
Correctly analyze server performance, including CPU, memory, bandwidth, disk I/O, and database metrics.
Isolate traffic to one particular geo-location and check how your website performs from there under stress.
Limit disk space or database capacity to check the website behavior under high traffic conditions.
Design test cases to download and upload large files during stress conditions.

Wrap Up: What Happens if Your Website Fails a Stress Test?

If your website fails a stress test, take it very seriously. Try performing a stress test multiple times with realistic conditions to identify breaking points, bottlenecks, and defects correctly. Optimize your systems based on the test report to ensure you have enough capacity to cater to a sudden traffic spike for planned and unplanned events. Use LoadView to generate real-world load and design efficient stress tests to test your website’s performance on multiple fronts. LoadView comes with many features to support virtually any stress test and generate insightful reports that help you optimize your website faster.