A bad user experience affects the business. That’s why you might want to know how many concurrent users your website can handle properly.
Load testing helps you simulate these users to gauge your system performance and see if your site or web application is meeting its goals.
Factors affecting website performance
On a website, performance is a crucial part of the user experience. It is often measured by the response time to viewing or interacting with certain information. The two main factors that affect user experience response time are:
- Frontend – html etc.
- Backend- SQL server (link to https://sqlandme.com/) etc.
Frontend performance focuses on browser metrics like render time, interaction time, load time, etc.
Backend performance, on the other hand, is primarily focused on server response time and the number of errors returned.
What is the most important? Depends. Generally speaking, the rule of thumb for performance states the following:
Between 80% and 90% of end-user response time is spent on the front-end.
But this is not necessarily correct.
With an increasing number of visits to your website, the front-end response time remains more or less the same. However, when your system faces increased competition, backend time can increase exponentially with increasing concurrent users.
When to test the load of a website?
In short, anytime you care about the uptime and scalability of your website.
If you have a very small number of users, backend performance probably won’t be an issue. You can spend your time optimizing the front end.
But as the number of users increases, you should start spending more time improving and testing the performance of your backend. In the rule of thumb for performance, Steve Souders noted that:
If you’re concerned about uptime and scalability, focus on the backend.
Browser metrics and load tests
When testing the behavior of the system with certain concurrent users, browser metrics are, in most cases, less useful.
Because each browser runs independently, the number of concurrent users in a load test will not affect browser metrics, such as render time.
Upload the test to a website
A load test focuses on checking the performance of requests made to your backend. The two fundamental aspects to analyze are the response time of the server and the number of errors.
For example, a load test simulating hundreds of concurrent users could validate that:
The server is not responding with errors.
The response time of 95% of your users should be less than 400ms.
The response time of your images should always be less than 600 ms.
Here are some common tips to keep in mind when testing a website load:
Decide what to try first
We recommend that you view performance testing as an iterative, continuous process.
You start with the smallest part, testing, evaluating, and iterating frequently.
Start small and simple, make sure you get test results first, then expand the test suite and add more complexity until you feel like you’ve reached the point where more invested effort will not give enough performance to your invested time. Simple tests are better than no tests.
The first thing is to decide which load tests to perform. On the one hand, you could test your critical services, which are the most valuable to your business, and which present the greatest risks. Instead, test the most frequent routes of users.
With this information, it’s time to analyze frequency of use, business value, performance risks, and any other critical aspect of your organization’s performance to help you decide what to try first.
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Interesting Related Article: “How To Get Extremely Fast Website And Page Load Speeds”