Website Speed Testing – Choosing Testing Software

Website speed testing is a must-do activity for any company and individual whose business is web-based. It is no longer an exaggeration to say that Internet is a powerful tool of money making and self promotion, provided you possess certain know-how and do things the right way. A part of a successful website promotion campaign is the website speed testing. Why? Many reasons actually.

Once your website is online, you and your business services become available to millions of potential customers. However, being online all the time is a great privilege granted only to those who can efficiently cope with such things as server downtime and website performance failures. The speed at which your server can process the request sent to it is a critical factor. If at a certain point in time the amount of concurrent users reaches its maximum, your website can go off and server downtime will be inevitable.

To avoid this unpleasant situation, you need to run website performance tests regularly. The website performance tests include load tests, speed tests and benchmark tests. All three types are an important part of website maintenance and need to be discussed in more detail.

Load tests are intended to check your website performance under high loads, but not unusually high loads, in order to reveal potential problems such as data corruption, buffer overflows, poor handling of resource depletion, deadlocks, race conditions, etc.

Benchmark tests apply minimal loads to the system in order to estimate average user experience with a particular website. Normal loads may also be applied as a part of benchmark testing to ensure an acceptable level of performance with such characteristics as response time and request processing time under the estimated load.

Speed testing is used to estimate the speed of request processing and the speed or server responce as well as other parameters such as the speed of website operation with minimum and maximum ammount of concurrent users.

To be able to perform quality website speed tests, you need to make sure you use the right software. While selecting the website testing software, keep in mind that it should have such a feature as speed evalution under real user activity. It should also be equipped with such tools as test recorder, scenario editor, test runner, and results viewer.

The test recorder tool is used to record real user activity as they browse the website in a browser window. The scenario editor allows adjusting the amount of concurrent users test sequence, as well as dynamic test parameters. The test runner allows specifying some additional parameters for the website speed tests. The results viewer presents the test results with graphs, numbers and other detailed information about your website performance.