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Testing Your Web Shop Performance for Peak Profits
By Michelle Megna
September 2, 2008

Web Load Testing: Prepare for Lockdown

The second critical thing you should do for prepare for the fourth-quarter flurry, is a Web load test, said Godskind. Adding new Internet applications, launching a marketing campaign or revamping your user interface, adds some stress to your e-commerce platform.

"This allows AlertSite to generate an artificial user load, what you expect during a peak shopping season, and lets us assess response time, and we provide a set of online reports to show how the site behaved," he said. "This type of testing is best done in September and October before you lockdown for the holiday season. You'll see as the test shoppers are searching, adding items to the cart, checking out, at what point to you start to see error pages and how the response time is under these conditions."

On-Demand Load Test

AlertSite's On-Demand Load Test is designed to help you make sure that your Web pages continue to scale well under heavy user traffic. This service enables you to conduct Web load tests anytime, while making sure that your Web site and Internet applications are always ready for maximum user demand. With a subscription to AlertSite's On-Demand Load Testing service you can:

Test your specified URLs at any time, on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Specify the number of simultaneous Web site users you want to simulate for any given test.
Determine when you want testing performed.
Create your own testing scripts, or develop testing scripts with support from AlertSite consultants.
Reuse your primary script as often as you like.
Receive test results and feedback immediately.

Godskind said load testing can help e-tailer decide what level of peak performance they're willing to fund. "If you know that, say Black Friday is your busiest day of the year, it helps to know just how much business you can handle, because it might not make sense to scale up everything to that level if you're only getting the traffic one or two days a year," he said. "But you'll want to know how your site is going to perform under those conditions."

Hosting, Scalability and the Error Page

So, what are e-tailers to do if they do run these tests and find out that they are not prepared? Godskind said it depends on the size and type of your e-business, as well as the relationship you have with your hosting provider. "It might be a matter of tuning and tweaking database settings, or redesigning a page to load faster," he said. "Or say if you're using an online store host, you call them up and say I need this much more capacity, what do I do next?"

As far as the cost for AlertSite services, there is a free 30-day trial, and Godskind said plans range from basic ones to more advanced that include a tech consultant who works with you. Finally, he said, no amount of testing can ensure that you won't have some glitches along the way. "The best thing to do in that case," he said, "is to make sure you have a graceful, branded — and perhaps even humorous — error page."

Michelle Megna is managing editor of ECommerce-Guide.com.

Do you have a comment or question about this article or other e-commerce topics in general? Speak out in the SmallBusinessComputing.com E-Commerce Forum. Join the discussion today!

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