Optimizing the performance of your website ensures that you get the most out of your online traffic by offering users the experience that they expect. Additionally, search engines reward websites that perform well with top rankings. You will, therefore, gain significant benefits from preparing your website for high traffic loads. Load balancing is the best way to start optimizing the performance of your website because it prepares your website for peak activity. When your website is ready to be stressed to its maximum limits, you can be sure that it will perform well on a daily basis. This post talks about some of the best practices for load testing.
Choose the Proper Load Testing Tool
One of the main benefits of load balancing is the ability to make use of your overall network of servers to maximize performance. You should consider having servers in multiple geographic locations to minimize download time for users around the world. You will need several different servers to get the most significant benefits out of load balancing. Many leading websites implement servers that are designed for specialized functions, such as rendering or processing, to get maximum value out of load balancing. Most importantly, you should have extra capacity available so that your load-balancing software can send traffic to other servers during times of peak demand.
Focus on Users
When profiling your load-balancing software, you should start by recognizing what users expect to see when visiting a website. Website visitors will notice when your animations appear choppy, so the delay between frames should be no longer than 16 milliseconds. When a user interacts with your website, a response is expected within 100 milliseconds. Users will wait about 1000 milliseconds before they start to get irritated with slow performance. You should make sure that your load-balancing efforts aim to optimize load times based on the expectations of users to obtain maximum results.
Process User Requests Quickly
Websites should acknowledge input from users with some form of animation or state change. If your website does not acknowledge input, users may repeat their actions several times before becoming frustrated. Additionally, inputs that are not acknowledged can leave users with a bad impression of your website. Users may feel like your website is poorly designed when their inputs are not acknowledged promptly, and this can lead to a negative perception of your products and brand. Ensure that all inputs are acknowledged within 100 milliseconds to avoid frustrating users when your servers are experiencing peak demand.
Load Pages Progressively
The impatience that people have online means that your website must minimize the amount of time that pages take to load. You can reduce loading time by downloading page elements progressively as users scroll down a page. Load-balancing software can make sure that progressive downloads are sent to an optimal location to minimize loading time. Progressive page loading reduces the demands placed on your server since less information will have to be processed and sent to users when only part of a page is being downloaded. You should make sure that your website can progressively download pages without significant delays when your server is experiencing maximum demand.
Conclusion
When load testing, it’s important to follow these best practices in order to get the most accurate data from your tests, and to ensure that you aren’t wasting your load testing dollars. If you’re looking for a cloud-based load testing tool that’s fully-managed, LoadView is an excellent option, both for the amount of data it provides and also because it’s extremely user-friendly to set up and run load tests.
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