Easy Steps for Performance Stability of Your Ecommerce Solution

Ecommerce website performance affects the behavior of online shoppers and may result in either winning new audiences or losing even your most devoted customers. Statistics says that almost half of potential customers abandon a website loading more than 3 seconds and just 1 second delay in page response is likely to reduce conversions by 7%. Moreover, dissatisfied users of your online store may share their negative experience with friends.
To identify performance issues before customers face them, corresponding testing should be included in regular ecommerce testing activities. In this article, we help you to understand performance testing better to improve the collaboration with the testing team and ensure effective testing which helps to address your solution’s performance risks.

Preparing for performance testing

Understanding the important steps that a testing team should take during the planning stage, you can check the completeness of the preparation to ecommerce performance testing.

Identifying how users’ behavior may influence website performance
This step is needed to detect website components that get the highest attention during user journeys. Some pages are likely to be regularly visited by numerous users, for example, a sales section highlighted on the welcome page of the online store. For other pages, user attention may grow while they feature the goods advertised in external sources with the redirects to the ecommerce website. It may be additionally needed to find out the approximate traffic in peak time. A testing team may lack this info, and, to improve this part of performance testing preparation, you may share it with the testing team.

Preparing test cases
The quality of test cases is an important factor in defining the success of performance testing. It’s necessary to ensure that test cases cover all performance aspects, including page load time and the transactions processing speed.

More about test cases: how to tackle performance risks from various sides

To effectively address possible performance risks, it’s useful to evaluate online store performance from various perspectives, for example:
• Performance tests identify the speed of performing operations and determine the scalability of the ecommerce website, in other words, to check how it handles increasing load.
• Load tests check how the online shop performs under normal and peak load.
• Stress tests check the solution’s performance beyond peak loads. They identify which failures happen and should be addressed and uncover the indicators of the failures.
• Spike tests can be additionally conducted to evaluate how the website behaves when it’s suddenly pushed to the max load.
• Capacity tests help to assess how many simultaneous operations a system can support and how many users can simultaneously shop online. For that, the testing team evaluates, for example, how much data can be processed by databases and file servers.

Mobile testing matters

As users are actively going mobile, it’s crucial to insure spotless performance of the solution in the mobile environment. For example, a testing team should conduct performance testing in the conditions when there are problems with internet connection to check whether the solution is ready for such cases. To address internet connection problems, a solution may load smaller images and user sessions may be saved every 30 sec to ensure that a user’s progress won’t be lost. Another important thing is that mobile testing becomes more successful if the real-life context is simulated (like shopping on the go, in a café, with many distracting factors).

Improving performance has its challenges

The results of performance testing naturally bring about recommendations to enhance performance. These recommendations may influence other aspects of the solution, such as security and usability. For example, smaller pics reduce load time in case of bad internet connection and improve overall performance. However, it’s inconvenient for mobile users to constantly enlarge pictures in order to see goods on offer in detail. Also, some changes in code carried out to enhance performance may lead to potential security vulnerabilities. Thus, it’s important to plan in advance how to improve performance with the minimum influence on other aspects of the solution and conduct regression testing when performance changes are introduced.

Summing up

Collaborating with the testing team, ecommerce managers can improve performance testing of their online store. As an example, during the testing preparation stage, you can provide the data about users and user scenarios thus ensure that the testing team have the knowledge they may lack. However, you should remember that as your website erformance is improved, this may generate new issues with other aspects of the solution. So, all the changes should be analyzing before implementing, and regression testing should be conducted when needed.

About the Author:
Andrei Mikhailau is Software Testing Director at ScienceSoft headquartered in McKinney, Texas. Andrei has 15+ years of experience in a range of SDLC processes, from testing and BA to and project management and QA. Throughout his career Andrei has successfully worked under various methodologies: RUP, MSF, XP, Agile and CMMI III/IV levels. He also has a proven expertise in developing a quality testing process under these methodologies.