The two biggest shopping days are Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and both bring unprecedented amounts of traffic to retail websites as people search for the best offers. This is also true for the holiday shopping season of 2024, as forecasts show that sales through the Internet are going to hit new highs. For example, U.S. consumers spent $9.8 billion online on Black Friday 2023 alone, marking a 7.5% increase from the previous year. Also, mobile devices’ contribution to the total traffic was 79% during Cyber Week in 2023, which imposes the necessity to prioritize mobile-friendly websites.
For this reason, it is crucial for any business selling online to perform website performance testing prior to Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. This process is important in understanding possible areas of congestion in the system, as well as in maintaining fast DNS resolution to avoid slow events during some of these activities. By conducting performance tests by an ecommerce testing company well in advance, you can address any issues and ensure the website handles them without crashing when they matter most. According to research, most mobile clients will leave a website if it takes more than three seconds to load, so every second counts as page loading time.
Tips for Avoiding Site Crashes and Slowdowns: Conducting Performance Testing
To prevent high risks associated with Black Friday website crashes and avoid downtime during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, one must ensure that they do performance testing. The following are types of tests that are positive to get your eCommerce store ready to deal with the increase in traffic while performing well simultaneously.
Stress Testing
Stress is a type of loading that places your website outside normal functionality to find its limit. These are important in helping find the maximum number of users your website can host before the website’s speed reduces or the site goes down.
Steps for Effective Implementation:
- Take the system to higher traffic levels beyond the predicted peak traffic level until the system is unable to cope or the performance drops drastically.
- Check the overall capacity of the stress of various infrastructure elements, including servers, databases, etc.
- Study the outcomes to find the critical areas and figure out the limits at which your website speed will decrease.
Stress testing allows you to understand your website’s limits and helps you build sufficient headroom to handle unexpected traffic spikes.
There are two main types of Stress testing: Spike testing and Soak testing.
Endurance Testing, also known as Soak testing
The endurance test assesses the stability of your site under steady traffic over an extended period. You can use an ecommerce website development solution to reveal problems that cannot be observed in short tests or during their quick passing, such as memory leaks, increased time for executing a definite number of statements, and server tiredness.
Steps for Effective Implementation:
- It will be helpful to imitate the constant influx of visitors as much as you expect on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
- Take screenshots of the website or record a video in which you examine closely how the various performance testing metrics, including CPU usage, memory consumption, and page speed, change over several hours or even days.
- Discover and fix any problems you encounter, such as degeneration of performance or depletion of resources.
By conducting endurance testing, you can prevent slowness and ensure website handles without crashing all the activities throughout the entire shopping event, even under continuous heavy loads.
Spike Testing
Spike testing involves loading your website with higher traffic compared to usual for a while to understand different situations where a high number of people try to access the site at the same time. This is especially significant regarding Black Friday and Cyber Monday since the promotional campaigns result in increased traffic rushes.
Steps for Effective Implementation:
- Run tests with traffic levels that are much higher compared to the usual traffic volume your website receives.
- Pay attention to how your website performs during these spikes, primarily with regard to response time and errors.
- A good strategy is to always increase server capacity, caching mechanisms, or load balancers to handle such surges.
Spike testing is crucial as it allows you to see if your website will fold under a sudden surge of visits, avoiding a Black Friday website crash at the crucial time.
Load Testing
Load testing captures a simulated audience concentration, which portrays how your website will be when a specific targeted traffic is accessing the site. Such testing is critical in determining how your eCommerce store would be during the busy periods such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Steps for Effective Implementation:
- Estimate the maximum traffic load by viewing past records and making proper estimations according to the marketing campaigns.
- Try reproducing this load with the help of automated tools and control key per testing performance indicators such as the page’s loading time, the server response time, and their throughput.
- Describe all the performance issues on your website and how to address the problem effectively in order to ease the load.
Load testing is essential to confirm that your website stays active and functional despite the number of visitors at any one time, especially during periods of increased sales.
Isolation Testing
Isolation testing aims to test each component or service of your website in isolation and then involve load to verify that it works as intended. This is important because a single unit may jam or develop a problem that will slow down the whole website or cause it to fail.
Steps for Effective Implementation:
- Find out which components or microservices should be tested, for example, payment systems, search, or purchase checkouts.
- Exposing these components to a high load while performing a test and keeping the rest of the system in check.
- Continue to track performance testing measurements and assess any failure or decline in performance.
Isolation testing helps to check if each aspect of your website is capable of dealing with this level of load independently and can help ensure that the website runs without crashing during a high-traffic period.
Volume Testing
Volume testing determines your site’s capacity to deal with heavy traffic in terms of the number of transactions, queries to the database, or file uploads. Such testing is crucial, especially for eCommerce stores, which are expected to handle a large number of orders during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Steps for Effective Implementation:
- Imitate high traffic levels of business transactions, data submissions, or any activity that a particular website will have to support.
- Check database utilization and query execution time, and identify the system’s performance in handling a large influx of data.
- Make changes to the indices, queries, and data storage formats to be able to accommodate the higher volume efficiently.
Volume testing can help you verify that your back-end processes and systems of your website are capable of handling large volumes of data and can do so without interruptions.
User Acceptance Testing (UAT)
User Acceptance Testing (UAT) is a type of testing where real users are used to test the website to ensure it meets their requirements and works properly. UAT is important to ascertain that every segment of a web site operates effectively and to ensure that some of the latest modifications made did not bring a new set of problems.
Steps for Effective Implementation:
- Use the real functional requirements according to average user flows like product catalog, adding products to the basket, and the checkout.
- Recruit a number of users that can use all types of devices and all browsers and operating systems.
- Collect the data of the clients’ usage experience of the application and their impressions of the utility, reliability, and effectiveness, and respond to the problems stated.
UAT plays a huge role in the confirmation of the intuitive interface of the site.
Security Testing
Security testing is crucial to mitigate cyber threats on your website, which include DDoS attacks, SQL injections, and others that are likely to happen during Black Friday and Cyber Monday when website traffic and security risks are high.
Steps for Effective Implementation:
- Work with your website to carry out vulnerability categorization tests that would determine and liable security inadequacies in your site.
- Conduct vulnerability, development, and penetration testing to capture the actual scenarios of attacks and determine the website’s capability of standing the challenge.
- Always ensure that all security patches have been updated, and encrypt data as much as possible when using it.
Security testing also assists in eliminating site breaches that may otherwise put customer details as well as the site’s reputation at risk while incurring major financial blows.
Cross-Browser and Cross-Device Testing
Cross-browser and cross-device testing allows you to ascertain how well your website is operating on other browsers in addition to other gadgets. Such testing is needed because people visiting your site during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, will be using it on different devices and browsers.
Steps for Effective Implementation:
- Find out the browsers and the devices most frequently used by your target audience.
- See how your website works, looks, and feels in these browsers and on these devices.
- Fix any problems that may be present so that users will not have to deal with problems while using the different devices.
Cross-browser and cross-device testing confirm that all people that visit your website have a positive experience, which is crucial to make sure the website works well with no lags and has high conversion rates.
The Consequences of Cyber Monday and Black Friday Website Crash
The consequences of a Black Friday website crash and slowdowns during Cyber Monday can be severe, both in terms of lost revenue and damage to your brand’s reputation. A website that fails to perform during these crucial shopping days can lead to:
- Lost Sales
Customers are unlikely to wait for a slow website to load or return after experiencing a crash, resulting in lost sales and missed revenue opportunities.
- Negative Brand Perception
A poor online shopping experience can lead to negative reviews, decreased customer loyalty, and a tarnished brand image.
- Increased Support Costs
A surge in customer complaints and inquiries due to website issues can overwhelm your support team, leading to increased operational costs.
- SEO Impact
Slow website performance can negatively affect your search engine rankings, making it harder for customers to find your site in the future.
- Legal and Compliance Risks
Website crashes and security breaches can lead to legal consequences, especially if customer data is compromised.
By conducting comprehensive performance tests before Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you can mitigate these risks and ensure website handles without crashing, delivering a seamless, high-performance experience during the year’s busiest shopping days.