Why is Performance Testing Important for your Brand and Bottom Line?

Today’s customers look for software applications that are aesthetically appealing, rich in content, safe, and capable of working seamlessly across devices. In short, they want the applications to provide a great user experience. Organizations have realized the critical role of user experience in the success of their applications. Hence, they are focusing on performance testing to ensure the scalability, reliability, efficiency, and responsiveness of the applications. Importantly, it is only by implementing a robust performance testing strategy that your software application can handle a situation where more users use the application seamlessly at the same time.

This becomes evident during big sales days like Black Friday. It has been observed that many eCommerce sites/apps face outages when thousands of shoppers visit them at the same time. Outages in the form of latency or downtime can cause user frustration and drive them to competitors. Thus, the non-performance of your website or app during the most crucial time can turn out to be extremely costly and hurt your bottom line. The only way to prepare your website or app to manage the extra load is by subjecting it to rigorous performance testing.

What is performance testing?

Performance testing helps to determine how a software application system performs in terms of speed, robustness, stability, and responsiveness when subjected to a specific workload. The indicators for application performance testing to consider include the following:

• Consumption of memory and processors
• Response time of the network, browser, and page
• Processing time of server request
• Acceptable volume of concurrent users

A robust performance testing approach reveals how a software application system will behave and respond to different situations. For example, the application may run smoothly with 1000 concurrent users, but how will it respond when the number is increased to, say, 10,000?

Since good user experience lies at the core of an application achieving success in the market, its absence can lead users to junk the application. This can have a direct bearing on the brand’s performance and the bottom line of the business.

Why is performance testing critical for your business?

In today’s digital age, the superior performance of your online platform (website/app) can lead to an increase in sales for your business.

Page speed: The users of your software application can face an increased level of frustration when the pages do not load as quickly as expected. Especially, when users are in the middle of a financial transaction and the software page takes forever to load, there is a simultaneous increase in frustration and loss of trust in the brand. According to statistics, a load time of 1 – 3 seconds can increase the user’s bounce rate by 32%. This can go up to 123% when the load time is of 1 – 10 seconds (Source: Hostingtribunal.com). Again, the slow loading speed of pages can hit the ranking of your website or app in the search results. Thus, performance testing can check the page load time of your website or app when a certain volume of concurrent users are there. This allows developers to increase the page load speed by executing certain procedures.

Scalability: With the growth in your user traffic and business, your application system should be expanded to accommodate more users. This isn’t possible to achieve unless you know the number of users the system can support by adding another CPU to the server. Also, what will the page load speed be in such a situation? All such information can be garnered by executing application performance testing.

Stability: Your website or application should ideally work consistently at all times. However, there are times when your system's load is higher, such as on Black Friday. On such days, when a larger number of your target customers visit your site or app to get information or buy stuff, the site or app should perform seamlessly. You would not want your system to crash, face downtime, or latency during such days, because the consequences can be very costly for your business. This is why stress testing has become crucial to determining the number of users the existing system can handle before reaching the breaking point.

Conclusion

Performance testing should be a priority before your website or application is deployed for actual use. It should be incorporated early in the development lifecycle to fix bugs or vulnerabilities, thereby saving time, effort, and money. A robust performance testing methodology enables you to understand if the website or app has the capability to handle a large volume of user traffic – an important criteria for delivering a superior customer experience.

James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality