Online Shopping has become an integral part of holiday celebrations, eventually Holiday Season has become a shopping season. Internet has become a convenient source to shop being at home; smartphone has extended this convenience to shop online anywhere anytime.

With time, holiday season has become one of the biggest sales seasons, as every year more and more number of retailers are offering massive promotional deals. Digitization has pushed every retailer to own a website, which works at its best throughout the holiday sales season; only then retailers can avail the holiday season to do more sales.

Impact of a downtime or a performance issue during a holiday season

During a holiday season, for a retailer to have a website with downtime or with some sort of performance issue means losing a potential revenue and incurring loss. Amazon has reported that if their website goes down even for a second, then it costs them $1.6 billion in sales each year. This number is so big because Amazon is a giant E-Commerce company but even a small retailer is prone to have a loss of thousand dollars if their website goes down or suffers performance issue during the peak sales hours.

Most popular surveys report that 1 in 4 visitors leaves a website and goes for another if the load time is more than 4 seconds, and not just that even a 2 second load delay at the check-out could make 87% of customers to abandon the ongoing transaction. In recent days, social media has become a popular medium for customers to report their concerns about a business, retailers are now more concerned about the negative impact a downtime or a performance issue may cause on their brand.

Holiday Season is not just for Retailers and E-Commerce

People plan to buy a variety of products and services in the holidays and some people plan to shop many things in the holidays with their annual Christmas bonus.

So, holiday season brings a peak sale season for not just retailers but also for businesses such as travel, gifts and decorations, event planners, and other big-ticket items like utilities, appliances and other expensive items like cars.

Holiday season brings 4 times more traffic to the websites that represent businesses, so all these websites shouldn’t lag in performance if they wanted to make more sales in the season. Therefore, doing different types of performance testing ensures that your website is up and running with high performance all the time during holiday season.

Different types of performance testing that helps your website not to lag in performance during holiday season

As Holiday season brings increased online spending along with the opportunity for businesses to grab a portion of their own through online presence, businesses should make their websites ready for the increase in traffic and satisfy every visitor with high performance of their website in order to convert them to a customer.

The following are different types of performance testing that can empower businesses’ website with high performance.

Load Testing

Load testing consists of tests with concurrent user load increasing from normal to peak for a specified time duration.

Why should Load Testing be done?

Well, load testing makes your website to undergo all sorts of real-time conditions that your website expects to come across in the production. The goal of load testing is to validate your website’s performance against different user load volumes to identify all performance issues or bottlenecks that a website may encounter when the traffic starts to hike from minimal to normal and normal to peak throughout a day in holidays.

Stress Testing

Though stress testing is subset of load testing, the concurrent user load pattern is what makes all the difference. In load testing user load is specified to increase from normal to peak for a regular interval of time but in stress testing user load will be at the peak stressing more on the website to identify the point at which it gets crashed.

Why Stress Testing should be done?

Well, stress testing can be done to achieve goals. The first goal is, to know at what point your website gets crashed as you cannot wait for your website to go down when it is having the peak traffic which could result in great loss of revenue. So, you need confidence of how much traffic your website can handle currently against the anticipated traffic for the holiday season, so you can decide on doing something to improve your website’s performance.

The second goal is, to improve your website’s performance itself by identifying and fixing the weak points in a chain.

Endurance Testing

Endurance Testing is testing your website’s endurance against the peak traffic for a longer time duration. In simple terms, Endurance Testing is prolonging stress testing for a long-time duration.

Why Endurance Testing should be done?

Well, the peak traffic that your website receives won’t be for a shorter time duration during the holidays. So, your website should be up and running all the time, it is receiving the peak traffic. To get that performance assurance for your website, there is a need for doing endurance testing for the holiday season.

Spike Testing

Spike Testing is testing your website’s performance against the sudden increase in the traffic from normal to peak.

Why Spike Testing should be done?

Well, due to the marketing campaigns you run during the holiday season, where you’ll be offering great discount offers or enticing deals, your website may receive spike traffic (sudden increased traffic) and it becomes a problem if your website cannot handle the sudden increased traffic. So, your website should undergo spike testing to empower it to be up and running for the spike traffic in the holidays.

Brainy QA Services Performance Testing Services to meet the holiday web traffic

Brainy QA Services Performance testing services aim to help businesses to empower their websites to be with high performance consistently across the holiday season. With the help of our “competency center of excellence for performance testing”, we help all the businesses, who wanted to grab their portion in the holidays, to identify and fix the performance issues in their websites before their customers notice them.

What businesses can expect from Brainy QA Services:

• Assessment of production readiness and recommendations to handle expected and exceptional transaction volumes during the holiday season.

• Understanding the user journeys and developing performance test scenarios around, and stimulating real-time concurrent user loads for

  • Load Testing

  • Stress Testing

  • Endurance Testing

  • Spike Testing

• In-house performance test framework with APM capabilities to provide better insights on performance bottlenecks and leakages.

At Brainy QA Services, we ensure your website’s performance is at its best, gaining the competitive edge and delivering a satisfied user experience to all your visitors in the holidays