At LoadView, we recommend stress testing your website regularly as part of ongoing development and in anticipation of high traffic days such as Black Friday. Let’s take a look at how load testing can help you maximize revenue and satisfy your users on a big sale day like Black Friday.
How Big Is Black Friday for Online Retail?
The post-pandemic era has seen a remarkable increase in online shopping. As more and more people preferred to stay at home to buy goods and/or to shop on their phones, ecommerce has soared in comparison to physical retail.
“Consumers in the UK alone were found to have spent a total of 8.71 billion British pounds over the course of Black Friday in 2022, of which 4.81 billion has been spent online – which is significantly less than last year’s result. In America, however, Black Friday sales were up by 2.3% from last year, with shoppers spending $9.12bn online. American consumers spent $8.9 billion online during Black Friday 2021.”
– salecycle.com
Whether you’re in the ecommerce business or not, regular stress testing will help you get the most out of your websites. For ecommerce companies especially, which directly serve consumers and which must be prepared for major events like Black Friday, stress testing should be an essential part of your development plan.
Website Stress Testing Considerations
Heavy Traffic Will Come
You will need a strong structure in place to serve the tide of users that flood your ecommerce website on Black Friday. Stress testing with LoadView enables you to see how heavy traffic affects your hardware, your network, your server, and most importantly your users’ experience.
You’ll want to first determine how much traffic your ecommerce website serves during a normal day, then review last year’s Black Friday (if you have that data), and construct your stress tests based on the information you have and anticipated traffic. Do you need to be able to serve 5x as many users as last year, based on trends? Stress testing will help you prepare.
Multiple Devices & Locations Will Be in Play
People use a wide variety of devices to shop online. You need to know whether your website will run at its best on all devices. Our industry-leading platform at LoadView allows you to simultaneously test from a variety of geographical locations and multiple devices, and gives you real user and real browser testing for the most accurate results available on the market today.
If your website is running well in Miami but not Chicago, this is essential information. You may be under the impression your website can handle high loads, when in fact users in various locations may be having wildly different experiences of your website. For ecommerce this can spell lost revenue.
People Pay Differently
People have different preferences for the way they want to pay. It’s important to test payment methods at scale in order to know you’ll be able to deliver a flawless checkout to numerous simultaneous customers.
Options for Website Stress Testing
Principally there are two types of tools for website stress testing in terms of software: open-source and a proprietary tool like our own at LoadView. It’s important to note that “open-source” load testing does not mean free, although you can download and tinker with open-source software itself at no cost.
LoadView vs. Apache JMeter
LoadView
At LoadView we work to give you a comprehensive load testing platform that requires little to no technical knowledge and allows you to perform complex, regular load and stress tests with as little effort as possible. It’s easy to spend hours with other load testing tools just to get the results we’ll generate for you in minutes with LoadView. With this saved time, you and your development team can focus on what matters most: improving your ecommerce website for users ahead of Black Friday.
One major benefit we offer at LoadView is a point and click scripting tool, our EveryStep Recorder. With it you can simply simulate a user behavior during a recording and create a script off that behavior – next to zero technical knowledge is necessary, and our team will support you at any stage of the process. This will help you save time you can use to further improve your website based on actionable insights from stress testing. Our intuitive interface can do you more good than you think.
LoadView features:
- Cloud-based, real user testing
- Real browser testing and scripting
- EveryStep Recorder for point and click scripting
- Testing possibilities from multiple locations
- 24/7 expert help
- Easy interface
Because LoadView is cloud-based, there’s no additional hardware or software required to begin to load testing today on our platform in minutes.
Apache JMeter
Apache JMeter is the go-to tool for open-source load testing. While JMeter is free to download, there are costs associated with it that may include:
- Maintenance
- Hardware setup
- Trainings involved
JMeter also doesn’t have the kind of dedicated support we offer at LoadView, although there is robust documentation and an active community around it. Beware burning too much time on an open-source tool, however, as you may find yourself getting less reliable stress testing results than you could with our platform at LoadView.
At LoadView, we have available a team of load and stress testing consultants available to support you at every step of the process, so you can get the most out of your testing budget and maximize revenue from a major online sales day like Black Friday. Consider us your expert partners for load and stress testing.
Choose LoadView Over JMeter for Your Black Friday Stress Testing
JMeter is the default for most technical users looking for an open-source load testing tool, but LoadView simply offers better value with an all-in-one load and stress testing solution that makes preparation for Black Friday easy.
LoadView’s load testing platform supports small and large businesses, all the way through enterprises that have massive user bases and highly complex requirements. In order to get ahead of user requirements for Black Friday, and to establish a load testing process with your development team, you’ll want a tool and partner who can support you throughout the process. That partner is LoadView.
Register for a free LoadView trial today and start testing in minutes. We’ll be glad to hear from you and look forward to supporting your ecommerce goals this and every Black Friday.