How To Test & Optimize Website Performance?

Website performance testing can let a company or a brand know on how rapidly any site loads on a web browser and demonstrate the quality of the website in terms of interactivity, reliability, and usability.  

Your site may have better content, products, and services; however, if your key website statistics or performance is poor, the overall UI/UX (User Experience), CRO, and lead generation activities are hindered. This is why most businesses, irrespective of their niche invest in web performance testing services these days.  

In this blog, we will learn about what website performance testing is and how it is essential in optimizing the performance of a website, with some other important insights.  

Let’s begin! 

What Is Web Or Website Performance Testing? 

Your business’s goals and purpose can be made or broken by your website, thus it is important to test it to reduce the risk of performance and quality problems. As a result, one definition of website performance testing is “Taking cautious action against a web application or website to ascertain its capacity to function under various conditions.” The conditions could include slow load times, slow responses, limited bandwidth, etc. 

But, Why It Is Necessary To Test Website Performance?  

Hundreds of pages, documents, and media assets make up any of the website. Testing the functionality of your website is a wonderful and an essential approach to:  

• Make sure a website built with various technologies functions properly on various browsers and distinctive situations.  
• Check that the front-end operations, such as dependability, scalability, speed, stability and responsiveness, and the back end operations, such as query time and throughput, are both effective or not.  
• It checks the ability of the website to handle enormous volumes and various traffic patterns.  
• It aids in website behaviour analysis for varied load levels.  
• Ultimately, most importantly it Finds the website’s and its connected applications’ bottlenecks. 
• Performance test determines and investigates the speed, scalability, and stability of a website in technical terms. 

How To Test & Optimize Website Performance 

The traditional method for undertaking performance testing can add a layer of complexity within the website’s existing silos. It is detrimental to rely on traditional methods of testing website performance, especially when websites undergo continuous changes and face frequent fluctuations in traffic. Therefore, having a handy solution on your side which can continuously check the performance of your web applications or website is quite favorable. 

There are several automation tools for testing website performance in the market. These tools promise to optimize website performance, sparing resources to look after the core issues and aspects of websites. 

With that said, let us quickly dig in to learn how performance testing is the key in optimizing website performance.  

1. A Better User Experience 

As per Google, more than 1/2 of all visitors abandon sites that take more than 3 seconds to load. Hence, the longer it takes for the web to load, the more chances users will leave your site.  Slow sites test consumers’ patience and form an unpleasant user experience. This makes users less likely to stay or return, hurting your business reputation.  

In contrast, users will have a pleasant experience if they can quickly interact with websites leading to instant fulfillment of their demands. In such cases, load testing helps to overcome this situation of hindrance where a bad UX can hamper the growth of a website.  

2. Boost Brand Visibility 

Page performance is one of the ranking considerations for SEO. Slow-loading websites lose ground in Google’s ranks. Even if your content is really relevant, Google will still lower you in the ranks if a web page does exceptionally well. 

This is where performance testing can optimize the performance of a website. 

3. User Retention 

A study revealed that 79% of visitors wouldn’t revisit a site once dissatisfied with the overall speed. A way to satisfy users is to check website performance. The perfectly performing website loads instantly, giving a pleasant user experience. Such users are more likely to come back, enhancing visitor retention. 

4. Higher Conversions  

Website speed and performance are prime factors in enhancing conversion rates and consumer satisfaction.  If your website user stays longer, they are further likely to convert. A conversion happens when a consumer or user takes action like filling out a registration form, purchasing a product, or subscribing to a newsletter that directly improves business metrics (potential sales). 

5. More Comprehensive Mobile-First Experience

For any website owner, implementing a mobile-first design is essential. The layout of the website must also be changed to make it mobile-friendly. They should also think about how quickly the website loads on mobile devices. This can be maintained with the help of Website performance testing.  

6. Reduction in Bounce Rate  

According to Google, a site’s bounce rate rises to 100% if its load time falls from 1 to 10 seconds. Consider a time when website traffic is at its peak. However, a longer website loading time causes people to quit the page right away. In that instance, it has an impact on the bounce rate, which may harm your website’s rating., However, in such case leveraging a website performance testing company can help you overcome these hindrances. 

Wrapping Up 

The significance of performance testing for web apps and websites in ensuring that they operate as expected cannot be overstated. All in all, as long as you are successful in producing an error-free product, it really doesn’t matter what you label your testing. Instead of performing manual testing, having the right test automation solution is quite helpful in ensuring the timely delivery of software products. 

Read more: Types of website performance testing

Putting AI & Performance Testing Together

The more, we are getting closer to the digital era, the need for performance-driven solutions is constantly expanding. Earlier, the focus of the tech firms was only restricted to developing technology, however, the exposure to applications and software has enabled users to understand the need for performance.   

Luckily, performance testing came to the rescue allowing IT solutions providers as well as enterprises working on business-specific solutions to create more dynamic products.  

The early phase of performance testing was limited to manual techniques only. However, the introduction of test automation frameworks and advanced testing methodologies have all changed things for good.  

And one such technology that is likely to redefine the entire future of performance testing, as well as other testing practices, is Artificial Intelligence. The authentic approach to performance testing services works by analyzing the UI and developing test scripts that can work on fetching the right response time, CPU utilization, throughput, as well as memory utilization, etc. 

Since BugRaptors always aim at embracing modern solutions and advanced tech to leverage our Quality Assurance services, this blog will aim at highlighting the potential of AI technology in improving the performance testing practices for futuristic solutions.  

Let’s begin! 

In its simplest form, AI technology has got some very significant answers on improving performance testing benchmarks in terms of application designs as well as other benchmarks of quality. These include drawing insights on potential factors like: 

• Expectations from an application when in production 
• Likelihood of bottlenecks 
• Parameters to maximize performance. 

Since most advanced apps and tech solutions need a mature approach to performance testing, AI allows simplification of tasks like test designing, implementation, and all other creative measures to upgrade the process. To underline how AI could aid in performance testing procedures, here are a few points that might help you develop an understanding of the process:  

• As AI brings pattern recognition features, the data retrieved from load testing could be used to model the performance of the application under test. The inference made could then be used to anticipate problems related to system efficiency as well as the likelihood of failures to ensure optimum system behaviour can be harnessed.  
• Another significant benefit of using AI for performance testing can be an advantage to attain the SLAs more conveniently compared to human-powered systems. From the monitoring of the granularity to identifying the system complexity, it could allow QA testers to observe any bottlenecks that might affect the UX. Moreover, AI can even be used to enhance the predictability of the issues present at any tier of the app development process which might be left unobserved when worked manually.  

Read more: How To Leverage AI For Improved Performance Testing

Performance Testing – Quality at Speed

Software companies are booming like never before in the world of digitization, and there is stiff competition amongst them to prove their worth and attract maximum clients. To deliver the best services to the end-users, testers and QA analysts must follow best practices of performance testing to check whether it is performing optimally or not. To have your customers satisfied, it is essential that the software does not take much time to load and does not stall while performing. Performance testing in software engineering is done to ensure that the application performs well under the workload by identifying and eliminating the performance bottlenecks of the software.

Different quality attributes of the system are measured using Performance Testing, like speed, stability, and scalability. These attributes help in determining how quickly does the application response, the maximum number that can be handled by the user, and to check if the application performs stably under varying load conditions.

Performance Testing Tools

The main purpose of using various performance testing tools is to identify the scope of improvement of the product before it is launched for customer use. It also specifies the measure of scalability, speed, and stability of the application. In case more numbers of user latch to the software, performance testing tools can figure out that it does not slow down when used simultaneously. It is used to check for inconsistency across various operating systems.

Quality Assurance analysts and testers use multiple tools and strategies for performance testing based on the requirements of the end-user and product.

Performance Testing Metrics

As mentioned above, various metrics are measured during performance testing, essentially to understand the effectiveness and quality of performance testing. It helps in further improvement of the software or mobile apps. There is a fine line of difference between the terms “measurement” and “metrics,” as the former is the data like time taken to respond to a request; and the later is a calculation that uses measurements to define the results’ quality, like total response time/request.  

The metrics used in performance testing of a software system or a mobile app are, as follows:-

• Response time
• Wait time
• Average load time
• Peak Response time
• Error Rate
• Concurrent Users
• Requests per second
• Transactions passed or failed
• Throughput
• CPU Utilization
• Memory Utilization 

How to do Performance Testing?

The main objective of Performance testing is to demonstrate that the mobile app or software system meets the performance criteria, which is already pre-defined. Different testers may follow different strategies for Performance testing. Let us understand the generic process of Performance testing, commonly used by a performance tester. It is often called the Performance testing life cycle.

1. Identify Testing Environment 

It is done mainly to understand the physical test environment, the production environment, and identifying various performance testing tools that are available. To perform efficient testing, testers need to know hardware, software, and network configuration details before the actual testing procedure.

2. Determining the Performance Criteria

The performance testers should be encouraged to define the goals and performance criteria as the performance benchmarks may vary in different cases. It includes performance criteria like response time, throughput, and resource allocation. Usually, testers compare their app to a similar one, to identify the performance criteria for their product.

3. Planning and Designing

The behavior of end-users varies in different scenarios and depends on the type of software or app as well. Performance testing of mobile apps or software is crucial for simulation of various end-users, planning of test data, and outlining all the performance metrics.

4. Configuration of Test Environment

It is essential to prepare the testing environment, arrange tools, and other resources, before the execution of the performance test.

5. Implementing Test Design

Performance tests need to be created according to the test designs.

6. Run Tests

At this step, the performance tests are run and monitored to identify any flaws in the software or app.

7. Analysis

Finally, the test results are collected and consolidated for analysis and sharing with other team members. Fine-tuning and re-testing help in further improvement at each step and eventually stops when the CPU causes the bottleneck. Increasing the power of the CPU can help, in this case.

Performance Testing using JMeter

Performance testing is used to analyze the overall performance of the server under heavy load, and it helps in determining that the mobile app, web app, or software will work efficiently for high load requirements. A typical performance testing tool is Apache JMeter, which includes Load Test and Stress Test, to offer various benefits, as mentioned below:

• Testing performance of Static resources, like HTML and JavaScript
• Testing Performance of Dynamic resources, like Servlets, JSP, and Ajax
• Identify the maximum load of concurrent users that can be handled with a website
• Provides graphical analysis of Performance reports

Performance Testing of Cloud-based Applications

Cloud computing is gaining a lot of popularity these days, mainly because of its cost-effectiveness. As performance is a pivotal factor in testing a web or mobile application, it is essential to measure the performance metrics of the cloud-based applications.

An inherent and essential step in Application Development is performance monitoring, as it verifies that the application is not impacted by any degradation factor that could be otherwise preventable. A simple sanity check can confirm this and is crucial in the case of parallel computing. While building an Agile Enterprise, performance monitoring needs to be integrated with VDM, to provide a model-based context. The performance testing test cases in the cloud differ from other traditional applications. Various Performance tests that should be conducted in cloud-based applications are, as follows:

• Stress test
• Load test
• Browser testing
• Latency testing
• Targeted Infrastructure test
• Failover test
• Capacity test
• Soak test

There are certain Performance Testing Best Practices that the developers, testers, and IT professionals should follow for the best results. Developers need to test the software and mobile app at an early stage and as frequently as possible because a single test will not be sufficient for thorough testing. Small and repetitive tests for individual modules are considered as one of the best practices in Performance testing. Multiple systems, like servers, databases, and services, are involved in an application or software, and individual units should be tested separately and all together. 

Many companies offer QA services, but entrepreneurs should seek the best performance testing company that has excellent expertise, highly skilled developers, and testers with vast experience in Performance testing.

Also Read: Case Study on Driving App Testing to enhance Performance 

Originally published at https://www.bugraptors.com.

Types of Performance Testing

In this blog, we will read different types of performance testing, but before that, you need to understand what performance testing is all about.

Performance testing is a kind of software testing that helps check whether the software or application can perform under heavy load and whether it can meet customer’s requirements such as stability, speed, and stability while running an application.

Types of Performance Testing – Explained!

Several types of performance testing come in software testing that you need to know if you are project managers, product managers, performance test engineers, software testers, or the person who just enters this field but face too many complications while identifying errors or testing the performance of an application.

• Load Testing.
• Capacity Testing.
• Volume Testing.
• Stress Testing.
• Soak Testing.

Load Testing

It is a non-functional testing type that helps to understand the behavior of the application/software under a particular expected load. It also comes under the kind of performance testing that is considered when it comes to determining the system’s performance under various load conditions. It helps you know how many users your application can handle at one time. It lets you identify the sufficiency of the infrastructure that is used for hosting any application.

Some load testing examples involve:

• Reading and writing data from a hard disk consistently.
• Executing two or more applications on a server or a computer simultaneously.
• Downloading a variety of large files from the internet.
• Allocating two or more jobs to a printer in a specific queue.

Capacity Testing

Capacity testing is one of the performance testing types that is used when it is the matter of checking how many transactions or users a web application will support or fulfill performance needs. It is performed mainly for future prospects. One can consider capacity planning to increase the volume of data and user base. If you want to accommodate the future load, you have to know how many extra resources like memory usage, processor capacity, network bandwidth, and disk capacity are essential to support future usage levels.

When to run capacity testing:

• When it is a matter of understanding that the application will support the future load or not.
• If you want to predict problems in terms of potential user-base growth, scalability, or know about the software’s capacity.
• When you want to analyze whether the app’s environment is capable of handling the upcoming increased load or not.

Volume Testing

Volume testing is also known as flood testing because it defines how efficiently the application can perform with an estimated and huge amount of data.

An example of volume testing is a new website of any college or a school that contains a small amount of students’ data. After a few years, this data can be increased in the website’s database, and it can make the application heavier. Due to this scenario, getting a volume test can ensure that the application or software will never be affected even after more data storage.

When to execute volume testing:

• If you want to check the system’s capacity and identify bottlenecks, this type of testing can be considered.
• From healthcare, banking, insurance, retail, government, energy & utilities to transportation, these are some industries that make big data applications, which need to be tested with volume testing.

Stress Testing

Stress testing or fatigue testing helps evaluate the stability of an entity, critical infrastructure, or a given software. The unexpected increasing user traffic on the Apple website or the release day of a new iPhone is the best example that requires stress testing in the real world. It is the activity of software testing that helps check the robustness of an application while testing outside the standard conditions.

Who needs Stress testing?

Companies that handle investments and assets mainly need stress testing to identify risks in the portfolio. It allows us to verify the unexpected failures that do not cause any security issues. With stress testing, it becomes easier for financial industries to check the performance of their software during failures, and it helps confirm Whether the data is successfully stored in the system before crashing or not. And, you can imagine that any loss of data in banking or financial application not only puts your customers at risk but also spoils your business.

Soak Testing

The other name of Soak testing is Endurance testing that one can consider if it is the point to evaluate that the application can handle continuous loads for a more extended period of time or how the software will perform with a normal workload. This type of testing is favorable for memory leaks that occur when a system fails to launch a discarded memory.

What will happen if soak testing is missing?

• The application will crash, or the operating system can cause failure due to the severe memory leak in the system.
• Any failure in the database connection under some conditions could lead to a complete system crash.
• If one doesn’t close the connections between the system layers, the possibility is that there will be slow performance given by some modules.
• The application can become less efficient, and the system’s response time can show gradual degradation.

Common Tools that Come in the List of Performance Testing Types

Here are some common performance testing tools that you need to check below:

• Apache JMeter.
• LoadUI Pro.
• LoadRunner.
• AppLoader.
• LoadNinja.
• WebLOAD.
• NeoLoad.
• Silk Performer.
• SmartMeter.io.
• WAPT Pro.
• LoadComplete.
• Appvance.
• LoadView.

Performance Testing: One Solution of Major Complaints

During performance testing, developers found common performance issues like slow response time, poor stability, long load time, and bottlenecks. Sometimes insufficient hardware resources and software configuration issues occur while calculating the performance of the software. But, the solution to all these problems are only performance testing that companies perform in the following steps:

• Understand the testing environment.
• Pinpoint performance metrics.
• Planning & designing several performance tests.
• Get the configuration of the test environment.
• Implementing test design.
• Executing tests one-by-one.
• Test Analysis.
• Preparing reports & Retesting if required.

[ Suggested Read: Case Study on Driving App Testing to enhance Performance ]

Conclusion

Now we’re assuming that you have no doubts regarding performance testing types & its process. If you’re still in doubt, you need to get a clear understanding from performance testers available at BugRaptors. If you are looking for cost-effective performance testing services, let us know your business niche & we will help you achieve a remarkable testing experience.

Originally published at https://www.bugraptors.com.

Baseline & Benchmark Testing: Exploring The Dynamics Of Performance Testing

The criteria for the development of software and applications have evolved with time. And this evolution is not just limited to coding practices, but the introduction of software testing practices. To make the development process adaptive and effective, these software testing practices were categorized into functional and non-functional test goals that were oriented to measure business requirements and performance standards.  

Functional testing is usually done with the purpose of measuring the functionalities for their performance and is usually done following practices like black-box testing, integration testing, regression testing, smoke testing, system testing, etc. On the other hand, non-functional testing is usually fostered by checking on performance, speed, stability, reliability, load and scalability benchmarks of the software. The non-functional testing could also be considered as a practice to check the software performance metrics under different stress conditions. 

Since we are done exploring the basics of software testing, let us dig into a bit more detail on understanding the performance testing component of the software testing process. Performance testing has two broad divisions which include ‘baseline’ and ‘benchmark’ testing.  

The testing of these metrics is done with the purpose of meeting quality standards and ensure that all service level agreements are met by the DevOps and QA-Ops teams. Let us quickly jump on the exploring performance testing metrics in detail exploring benchmark and baseline testing.   

Baseline Testing 

Baseline testing could be defined as the process of recording performance metrics of the software. This data is then used to compare the performance testing data retrieved from the application after any updates to code, hardware, network, or software are made. This data is then documented to ensure that the end product delivered to the users is completely stable and offers the desired quality. 

Significance of Baseline Testing 

Baseline testing is done with the purpose of measuring any performance degraded with time as the application or software goes through changes. In case, the results show no change in the performance, the data is then used to define measures that can help yield the baseline performance of the application in the future.  

In other words, baseline testing helps to ensure that the software or application under test offers an intact user experience in any test conditions or in case of any updates are made. Some of the key benefits of baseline testing could be highlighted as: 

1. It can help testers to define baseline for performance goals. 
2. Baseline testing allows detecting any possible bottlenecks that might affect the end performance 
3. Baseline testing is a great practice for rapid performance tracking 
4. It is an easy-to-follow process that helps add more efficiency to the end product 
5. Baseline testing can also help to identify any errors with the configuration. 

Benchmark Testing 

On the other hand, Benchmark testing is the practice of checking performance metrics for the performance testing results that are achieved by your software testing service provider. This data is usually measures on industry standards in order to determine quality of the software. Besides, Benchmark testing helps testers to take an account of software, hardware, and network for its performance capabilities with the purpose to foster quality standards for existing as well as future versions of the software or application. 

Significance of Benchmark Testing  

Benchmark testing is a practice to meet quality standards along with SLAs. This is why the process is usually repetitive and quantifiable since the end goals are about creating a product that meets the business standards and could yield a perfect user experience. Some of the key benefits of benchmark testing could be listed as: 

1. Benchmark testing can help in comparing performance of the product with those of competitors. 
2. It helps to create a perfect user experience and system availability.  
3. It can help achieve the compliance goals.  
4. Benchmark testing can help evaluating the achieved results with those of the vendors. 
5. Benchmark testing helps to create development best practice to achieve desired and measurable results.   

Get Pro Advice On Baseline and Benchmark Testing! Reach our experts at BugRaptors today… 

Baseline & Benchmark Testing: The Differences 

Since most people, when informed about Baseline and Benchmark testing, tend to see no difference between the two, some of the major differences include: 

Baseline Testing	Benchmark Testing
Baseline testing is a practice of recording the metrics post the performance tests.	Benchmark testing is a practice of evaluating an application against pre-defined metrics.
Baseline testing is limited to individual software or application.	Benchmark testing is a set of standards that are consistent for all applications.
Baseline testing helps to test for user experience and application functionalities.	Benchmark testing is a practice to ensure compliance while maintaining business standards and meeting SLAs.

Rolling Deep Into Performance Testing Phases For Baseline and Benchmark Testing  

Since most modern-day application development and software, testing service providers stick with agile practices, there are certain standard testing phases of benchmark testing that could help achieve optimum performance: 

• Planning 

This stage usually involves identification of pre-defined standards and project requirements for both benchmark and baseline testing. This phase helps the testers to identify most critical factors of the application that can affect the performance and user experience. 

• Analysis  

This is the second stage of the testing process, where end goals and objectives related to a test process are established to ensure early error identification and offer a perfect end solution. 

• Integration   

The integration phase needs testers to amalgamate functional and non-functional requirements of the process with approval from the stakeholders.  

• Action  

 Last but not least, action phase is all about creating test cases, execution, and measuring the results for comparison with defined metrics.  

Metrics and Components For Performance Tests 

Performance testing emphasizes on checking the various metrics and components of the application development process. This data is checked and reviewed for every change made to the application in order to ensure that the final product is developed to meet the end user’s requirements.  

1. Loading time 
2. Response time 
3. Wait time 
4. Peak response time 
5. Error rate 
6. Requests per second 
7. Transaction response 
8. Web server throughput 
9. CPU Utilization 
10. Memory utilization 
11. Disk I/O 
12. Concurrent users 

 Components of Baseline & Benchmark Testing 

Achieving the right results through baseline and benchmark testing needs you to work on three major components. These include: 

• Workload specification (Request types and operable frequencies) 
• Metric specification (Checking the metrics for performance measurement) 
• Measurement specification (Checking the correctness of achieved test values) 

However, when it comes to precision with performance testing results, make sure the performance testing services should maintain consistency and control on the process. This would help understand the app architecture for critical testing. Besides, the tests should always be performed using real-browsers to test for actual load conditions while simulating different geo-locations. Such practices allow testers to finetune the test process from time to time making the most of baseline and benchmark testing. 

The Crux 

Performance testing is a process that should be initiated at the earliest stages of application development, especially when you need your product to behave in a specific manner under desired load conditions. Baseline and Benchmark testing allows you to achieve consistency in the testing process as you take assistance of tools like LoadView to meet performance goals.  

Moreover, aligning with the above defined criteria and components allows you to work on different load curves and create reports with some strict actionable insights. Above all, benchmark and baseline testing help you to create applications that can ensure desired market response while meeting the intentions of end-users. Besides, it can help you cut-off any downtime and identify any errors that might disturb the business objectives.  

[ Suggested Read: Case Study on Driving App Testing to enhance Performance ]

Good luck! 

When you and your teams are investing your time and effort in developing applications that are responsive to defined thresholds, consider taking the expert assistance on performance testing services. 

Let’s connect and find out the best way to help you create an impactful user experience. Call now! 

Originally published at https://www.bugraptors.com