Load Impact Load Testing and Performance Testing

Christmas season is usually the busiest and most profitable period for online retailers and travel related sites. According to Comscore.com, in 2009, November's internet traffic to e-commerce sites grew by up to 47% against the base period (Aug 31st to Nov 1st). With a fast recovering economy, website owners can expect a greater increase in internet traffic during the year-end holiday season.

This might sound like good news to e-retailers but a sudden increase in traffic creates stress on a server and slows a website down. Moreover, poorly designed webpages that are not optimized for speed further prolong load times. Even  a one second increase in load-time from three to four seconds will result in a dramatic decrease in customer conversion rate. Key findings from the "Consumer Response to Travel Site Performance" study conducted by PhoCusWright and Akamai showed that 57% of online shoppers will wait three seconds or less before abandoning the site and that 65% of 18-24 years old expect a site to load in two seconds or less. This means e-retailers actually lose many potential customers without even realizing it.

In the e-commerce market where profit margin is thin and competition is tough, minor tweaks that make website load faster will give retailers an edge over their competitors. Webmasters can choose between a variety of free online tools to check their website's performance and also get useful tips. Google's Page Speed and Yahoo's YSlow are two more popular choices that analyze web pages and suggest ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. Both services provide a grade for the website which webmasters can use to benchmark their website against the competitor's. Good practices as well as suggestions are also give and the services are free to use.

The good news is that there is still some time left before the Christmas traffic hits and webmasters can further optimize their website to prevent a "winner takes all" scenario where a few fast loading e-retailers account for the bulk of the online sales.

P.S.: We have a Christmas promotion going on here

With page speed now a factor affecting your Google ranking, it seems that more web services are interested in having a page analyzer or load testing tool on their website. However, creating your own load testing application takes time, and even integrating open source tools can be a drain on precious resources.

So, we came up with a 5 minute solution to tackle this problem.

We have created an interactive flash object, so it is now possible for you to integrate Load Impact's load testing and page analysis tools on your website. You can even start a load test from your blog. Because each website has a different layout, we went ahead and created 2 different designs for each tool. You can see the two different styles below:

Page Analyzer Tool (Design 1)

Load Testing Tool (Design 2)


Take a peek to see all the flash tools that we have created.

To place these flash objects on your website, you just need to copy and paste the html code available here into your web page or blog. Nifty, huh?

Of course, if you don't mind spending a little more time on integrating our services with yours, do drop us a mail and we will be happy to introduce you to our co-branded Premium Partnership Program, where we offer attractive margins (kick-back) per subscription sold.

Otherwise, feel free to try out the flash tools and let us know what you think!

Fast sites get better search engine ranking

Late 2009, Matt Cutts from Google, made a speech were he said that Google might start using page speed as a factor when ranking search results, meaning that a faster web page would get a higher Google ranking than a slower one. Google were then already using landing page speed as a component when calculating Adwords quality scores, and from there the step was probably not so great to start using it when presenting search results also.

On friday, the Google webmaster blog announced that Google is now actively "using site speed in web search ranking". The fact that the world's most popular search engine thinks web site performance is a key factor to user satisfaction means a lot of people who previously were not too bothered with performance are now likely to start scrambling to improve the performance of their sites. We are of course only too happy about this, as web site speed - testing and optimization - is what we are all about.

In practise, this means that a fast webpage will now get a higher search ranking than a slow one. Or, more accurately, a fast webpage will be slightly favoured by Google in the comparison with a slower webpage. There are of course a whole range of other factors used when computing the ranking of a page.

As a web site owner or developer, it is going to be ever more important to keep your site and your pages fast and responsive. There have been several reports about how slow sites will cause you to lose business. If your web service is slow, your users are likely to abandon you for a competitor whose service is faster and more responsive. When industry players like Google also openly start favouring speed it is a clear message that now speed is everybody's concern.

What to do?  Well, if you're a web developer you should start thinking about performance when writing code. This is not something you can do as an afterthought (or you can, but it will take a tremenduous amount of extra time) - it has to be part of your creative process.

The trick isn't to write code that performs well when you test it by yourself. The trick is to write code that scales - code that performs well when there are 10, 50 or 100 people accessing your site at the same time. Many developers aren't very good at this, because it requires a different mindset than just writing code "that works". Instead of just thinking "will this work?" you have to start thinking "will this work with 1,000 users on the site?".

It doesn't have to look like this. A software that scales well
is like a road that gets wider when traffic increases.

Both as a web developer and a site owner you will want to test your web pages to see that they perform well and that they scale well. There are various tools, techniques and methods you can use. In the upcoming weeks we will be writing a couple of articles on how to improve performance of your site, aimed both at developers and site owners. Keep an eye on this space.