Website Performance

Well, here's my first blog post in this community. Hope you find it useful. Since I just joined this network today, I'm not even sure if the members have much interest in technical subjects. Please let me know if you find this of value; otherwise, I will probably not continue this blog. Consider this a test.

Nelson Tan wrote a blog that I found titled "How to Evaluate Website Performance". It is well-written and helpful as a primer relative to the marketing side of performance. In other words, he is discussing how to make your site productive in producing new paying customers or getting people to sign up. Nelson does a great job of explaining such concepts as conversion rates. Well done Nelson!

I found Nelson's blog because I had searched on "website performance". However, I'm a geek with a Computer Science degree, so I was hoping for something about how to measure the technical performance of a site. For example, testing a website to know how many seconds it takes to receive an order confirmation when 100 buyers are all shopping on my site.

That type of "web performance testing" is very useful because it is common to generate errors when too many people are using a site. Stories hit the news every week about big sites (e.g. Apple, Microsoft) that crash because too many people were using it at the same time. When that happens, customers get angry and don't come back.

Your site likely won't get the traffic of Microsoft or Apple, but do you know for sure that 5 people could all be buying at the same time? Does it slow down? Does it give any error messages?

What about 10 or 50 or 500? Anyway, you get the point.

There are tools to let you check out the performance of your site. These are commonly referred to as "load testing tools". Many are open source tools that are free. Some can cost up to $50,000 for 50 virtual users. Some require you to install software on your own server. Some are part of consulting services where you pay for a tester's time. And some of the newest, most innovative solutions are simply websites themselves where you easily try it out without buying software or hardware. Those are known as "on-demand" or "software as a service" performance testing sites.

Regardless how you test it, you would be doing yourself a significant favor to find out the volume your site can handle. Wouldn't it be a crying shame if your customers found out the performance problems of your site before you did?

If you are interested in other aspects of the technology of web sites, please ask. For more info on load testing, performance testing, stress testing, or volume testing, you can check out my site at http://loadstorm.com. We are releasing LoadStorm on 1/16/09, and if you are interested in testing your site for free, please sign-up for an account.

May your site never crash and always produce the results you desire.

Thanks,
Scott