Website outages can cost you thousands or even millions of bucks on some of the most important days of the year, such as Black Friday, Valentine’s Day, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and Mother’s Day. Thousands of people may want to visit your website on these days to enjoy the massive discounts that you provide on your products and services. But is your site ready to handle such heavy traffic? Even sites for major brands like Adidas, PlayStation, and H&M experienced major outages last year due to a sudden surge of visitors.
So why did these outages happen in the first place?
Basically, websites are optimized to handle a certain number of visitors at any time. But during traffic-driving sales or promotions — say, the typically epic sales around Black Friday weekend — some websites receive a tsunami-like flood of shoppers. This can cause slow site loading times, checkout difficulties, or a total website crash.
Unfortunately, many sites don’t test how much traffic they can handle, and thus don’t realize if there’s a bottleneck in their website’s infrastructure, or an unexpectedly low capacity limit. So when these infrastructure weaknesses cause failures at a critical moment, it results in costly delays and lost sales — sometimes in the realm of millions.
One of the best ways to solve this problem is by load testing. Load testing uses large numbers of virtual users to browse and interact with your website, simulating the experience of receiving high scale traffic on big shopping days. The load testing process will pressure your website to test how it responds to the additional load when thousands of people use different devices to access your website. Think of it as a trial run before your major sale goes live on-site. This way, you have time to discover and address any potential problems before they impact your bottom line.
And when it comes to load testing, there is no better provider than Snapt. Its managed service tests your app or website’s ability to operate quickly and responsively, even when there is more load than usual.
How Does Snapt’s Load Testing Work?
Snapt’s stress-testing measures your website’s peak capacity – how many visitors it can handle at the same time, and over a sustained period. The test results highlight any bottlenecks in your infrastructure where capacity and performance limits are likely to cause problems, and the areas you need to fortify to keep your website from crashing on essential days when you expect significantly more traffic.
High-scale virtual users
The test involves a high-capacity testing network that creates millions of virtual users from eight different locations around the world to find out whether your site can handle traffic during large-scale events.
Realistic user behavior
In addition to creating millions of virtual users, the test also simulates realistic user behavior, such as adding products to shopping carts, multiple user logins simultaneously, page browsing, and checking out from the payment page.
Reporting and consultation
When Snapt finishes testing your website, their team provides a detailed report that pinpoints your site’s peak capacity and identifies the weak spots. Snapt will then work with your engineers to address the problems and attain the capacity and resilience that you need.
What Makes Snapt’s Load Testing Unique?
Realistic scale
Simulating millions of virtual users doesn’t have to cost a fortune. With Snapt, you can thoroughly and affordably figure out your website’s capacity by using their high scale automated testing network, which is capable of generating traffic from multiple geographical locations.
Personal touch
One of the lead engineers from Snapt will develop a customized test plan to stress-test then optimize your website or app. This is no one-size-fits-all bandage; Snapt provides a precision strategy to fix your load problems and prepare your platforms for high traffic.
Trusted experts
Snapt experts have years of industry knowledge which they can leverage to offer you practical and actionable tips to boost your performance and reach your target capacity. With Snapt in your corner, your brand can ensure that your website or app can efficiently handle a surge in traffic without snapping.
Get the Most Out of Your Next Promotion
With major holiday sales on the horizon, now is the time to optimize your site or app — before you miss out on the biggest shopping days of the year.
Fortunately, Snapt has the solutions you need to prepare your online presence for the holidays and beyond. With four packages for load testing, Snapt offers services for any budget, starting from only $2,000. So you can choose the right option to fit your business, your needs, and your budget.
Want to make your next promotion or event a roaring online success? Contact Snapt today to find out more about load testing for your business.
