Thanks Giving Day holiday season is inching now. Only two more weeks for the door busters and online mega sale across US. Is your infrastructure capable of handling unexpected load? Is capacity planning done for the anticipated volume of users? Is performance validation completed for your online stores and backend systems? If not, read further. This article will tell you about 10 signs you should validate the performance.
For any business success two things are important: Innovation and Performance. Innovation is a gate pass whereas performance defines your sustainability in the market. No user returns to your website, if the website performance is poor. If below signs occurred, then you should validate your performance testing/engineering process in your organization.
Table of Contents
10 Signs You Should Validate the Performance
Drastic drop in the monthly visitors
From the analytics, drop the graph between visitors and the month. If there is a drop in the monthly visitors, then there will be two reasons. One is there is no proper SEO (Search Engine Optimization) done and second is high response time in the web pages. You may need to reach your infrastructure team to validate the performance from past 6-12 months’ statistics to compare and drilldown to the root cause.
High Page response time in critical pages
If the users dropping out (bouncing rate) is high, then you need to validate in which page they are dropping out. Particularly in checkout or adding the items to the cart or comparing the various models etc. You need to validate the response time for those critical pages and check what is the throughput of that page. E.g. how many orders your application is processing in a minute. If there is a drop, then you need to identify the bottlenecks.
High resource usage
Continuously you need to monitor the resource usage and identify which server is utilizing more resources than the expected. Critical metrics are CPU, Memory, Disk, Garbage Collection and Network. If there is a peak in the resource utilization, then you need to identify the root cause and perform the vertical/horizontal scale up (if necessary).
Database Queries
Your infrastructure should have separate databases for read and write/update. Databases should be properly configured and the queries should be optimized. If the query is complex, it will impact the operations and in turn the performance.
More number of redirects
More number of redirects is not a performance factor but still it may affect the performance. If your page is redirecting to several pages, it may affect the performance. It will irritate the user experience and finally user will close the browser.
DNS Lookup time
What is the Domain Name System (DNS) lookup time of your server? It should be in milliseconds. If the DNS lookup is taking more time, then you need to improve it otherwise it will impact the overall response time.
Browser Compatibility
Your application should support various browsers and devices. Response time should be consistent irrespective of browsers and devices. If particular browser/device response time is high, you need to identify the root cause.
Competitors’ performance
Periodically you need to compare your website performance with the competitors’ performance. If the performance is varying negatively then you need to tune and implement latest framework for your website.
Resources Optimization
Content Delivery Network should be leveraged properly by caching the resources such as CSS, images, JavaScript, and other. Images are critical for any e-commerce websites. Images should be optimized for the speed.
Caching
You need to implement appropriate caching techniques for your web application. If the caching is not enabled or poorly configured, it will impact the performance. You have to enable browser caching, minify the CSS and JS files to increase the speed.
Conclusion
For better performance, performance engineering/testing team should involve in the SDLC process from the inception. Capacity planning, workload model, SLAs, and load volume should be identified and approved by architecture team. Developers should be advised performance in mind while writing code and proper techniques should be implemented. Proper testing tool should be identified and testers should perform appropriate testing by understanding the real time scenarios. Overall success is with architecture, development, and testing team.