Black Fridays for your Ecommerce sites

Have you ever wondered how e-commerce sites handle huge loads for Black Fridays or big Indian sales? High performance is a must for any e-commerce site. It is really important for any e-commerce platform to perform really well on their big sale day.

How can this be achieved? How can you trust that your site is ready for this event? On average, a customer would not wait for more than 9 seconds for a page to load and then he will go to a different page or website. So maintaining a clean performance can gain you lot of business along with a higher Google ranking for your website. SEO ranking also improves as your site has optimized performance.

According to Google’s latest research, the time it takes to load the average mobile landing page is 22 seconds. However, research also indicates 53% of people will leave a mobile page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

How is the server performance evaluated in such scenarios? There are various tools to measure your server performance. Starting with Pingdom, which lets you choose a test from different locations. You can also get an excellent summary of the test results, including performance grades, insights, response codes and content size by type/domain/type.

Web page test, Dareboost, Dotcom-Monitor, Site 24× 7 also lets you to run the test from multiple locations worldwide. But to do better performance analysis, along with the specific server performance, you have to seek a different set of tools like Apache Jmeter (free), WebLOAD, LoadNinja, SmartMeter.io etc. These tools can help you identify the server work, average load time and the median response time, among other things. These also give you the page response for 90 percentile value, which means the time taken for 90 percent of users. Error percentage can also be seen for each page.

These tools can also help you evaluate user workflows rather than just a homepage. They can integrate values like the user think time, which is the actual time that a user spends on a given page. You can take your performance testing to another level by running the tests and by creating mockup users from Cloud. Blazemeter is a paid tool which helps you do just this.

So far, for any competing Ecommerce site, performance testing is an integral part. These tools give you an indication of how well your Ecommerce website runs, particularly under load. They can guide you in optimizing your website and increasing your Google ranking.