Performance Testing: A Key to 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 testing services these days. Deloitte’s study states that a slow-performing website will notice an increase in bounce rate and a decline in time on the website. A user won’t stick to a website for long if the website takes more time to load. The study suggests that a 1-sec delay is possibly believed to reduce:

Reduce web page views by 11%

Decrease customer satisfaction by 16%
Hamper conversions by 7%

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.

Knowing The Types Of Website Performance Testing

Testing Performance of the website is not confined to just the user’s experience. Rather, it involves several aspects that affect or are the reasons behind the website’s degraded performance, all of which require separate methodology and processes along with numerous considerations. Hence, web page performance testing has been divided into different branches or we can them different types which individually check different aspects of the website with different objectives.

Load Test: The load test of the website as the name suggests, Verifies web application’s behavior under normal and peak conditions. It actually measures the response times and throughput rates and identifies the breaking point of the website’s or web application’s performance in a pertinent load.

Stress Testing: This type of testing analysis the behaviour of the application under load conditions that are higher than its maximum capacity and finds faults in such situations. It typically includes race conditions, memory leaks, and synchronisation problems.
Capacity testing: A capacity test establishes the maximum number of transactions that a website or application can accommodate without sacrificing its performance objectives.
Spike testing: It is a subtype of stress testing, which aims to identify how the web application will behave when there is a sharp rise in the number of visitors accessing the website at a particular time.

Wondering How Continuous Performance Testing Works? Read Here: Continuous Performance Testing: Understanding The Best Practices

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 speed 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. At Bugraptors, we deliver cutting edge performance testing services to numerous fields. We offer comprehensive analysis and recommendations, using advanced tools, for load and performance improvements. Connect with our experts at info@bugraptors.com