Website Owners’ Nightmare: Black Friday

Website Owners’ Nightmare: Black Friday

Any website can run smoothly under normal circumstances if they are implemented properly. But there is always a question in our minds: Will it still run smoothly in heavy traffic? We know that the “normal” circumstances are not always exactly met, and that there are always ups and downs in the traffic density much like a rollercoaster. The downs are not an issue since less traffic causes no latency; but the ups are the times you need to be prepared for. But when exactly should you expect these ups? Black Friday is a good example to this. In that period of time, e-commerce websites get the most traffic and have to be able to handle all the traffic. That’s when the website owners face with their perfect nightmare; not being able to satisfy the demand from their customers.

No Readiness = No Customer = No Profit

Not being able to satisfy the demand coming from your customers? That means not being able to make profit from your visitors. And that’s unacceptable for a business. Good profit comes from being ready for all types of circumstances. But how can you, as a website owner, be prepared for such circumstances? The answer is testing in advance and seeing whether if the customer would be content with the service. But creating heavy traffic is not easy, since it’s not just about a few people visiting simultaneously.

It’s thousands, or maybe even millions of people visiting at the same time and obviously that much of computing power takes up a lot of space. To deal with this problem, we recommend you to check out our product: Loadium. With Loadium, we offer you the ability to test your software without having to allocate any resources. For more information on why you should use our product Loadium, check this article.

Ready For When?

Should you be prepared for the ups in the holiday seasons? To get the most out of your website on holidays, yes, you should. In the case of Black Friday, you must be thinking it is a time too far away to consider. It is never too early to start preparing. The more time you have, the better you will be prepared. Last minute rush to better a software can result in crippling the software entirely. There’s also another question to ask yourself. Should you only be prepared for the holiday seasons? Of
course not. You can expect an enormous increase in holiday seasons like Black Friday, but it’s absolutely necessary to be prepared for a spike in visits any time of the year, any day, any time. It’s not just about the holiday seasons, it’s about being ready for anything.

How to Prepare?

At this point you know you must be ready at all times. But how can you prepare yourself? The testing procedure for this specific requirement is called “load testing”. You can set up your own equipment on-premise to enable load testing, but that’s a lot of resources flying out the window. We are talking an enormous initial budget to get hardware, a constant budget to maintain the hardware in good condition, an initial budget to set up the necessary platforms for all the hardware, a budget for personnel, and etc. But don’t worry, there is another method you can implement to enable load testing.

Load testing does not mean you have to physically have the computers on-premise. You just have to have a connection to be able to carry out the tests. That’s called Cloud-based Load Testing. It’s much more advantageous than on-premise testing in various ways, which we have talked about in our other article.

To sum up, you must be prepared for all circumstances that might occur during holiday seasons, but you must also be prepared for the same circumstances at any time by all means. It’s about being ready. To get ready for days like Black Friday (or for any day), start load testing now with our cloud-based testing platform Loadium!