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How to Optimize Your Web Application’s Performance with Testing

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Photo by Todd Quackenbush on Unsplash

Due to an ever-increasing demand for content and services, the expectations for a good user experience have skyrocketed in recent times. Gone are the days, when a website or a blog would be used to just deliver content or answer FAQs.

From ordering food to booking flight tickets and filing taxes, everything’s become online.
When platforms like the ones mentioned above provide online services, it is important to ensure that the user is able to interact well with the website and get what one is looking for.

While the user interface of the web application plays a vital role in the intractability, another equally responsible factor is the performance of the application, which determines the overall user experience. For example, nobody would want to wait for a UI-heavy website to finish loading a page that intends to only show exam results or something similar.

The first step to a great user experience is performance. It is about how fast the end-user is able to retrieve information and perform actions.

How to Assess a Web Application’s Performance?

When we talk about things like a website’s load speed and interactability, what is the measuring scale that tells if an application is fast or good enough in terms of performance?

In the context of web applications, these metrics are evaluated by what’s called web vitals. It is an initiative by Google to provide unified guidance for quality user experience. The core web vitals are LCP (largest contentful paint), FID (first input delay) and CLS (cumulative layout shift). It is basically metrics that determines the performance of a web application. You can read more about web vitals in the link provided above.


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Lighthouse is a famous tool available that can be used to evaluate a webpage’s performance along with other parameters like accessibility and SEO. To run a lighthouse test, right click on the webpage and go to Inspect > Lighthouse > Analyze page load.

Optimize Web Application Performance with Performance Testing


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Tests like unit and integration testing have always played an integral part of any software development life cycle, but performance testing is something that is often ignored and not taken care of.

Performance testing is a type of testing used to gauge a system or a component’s level of fuctioning. By applying various parameters under various load scenarios, it evaluates the functionality of a system’s constituent parts.

One of the most difficult aspects of web application testing is performance testing. Performance testing, when done correctly, may predict product behavior and its to user activities with an astounding level of detail and precision. Therefore, it is worthwhile. Not monitoring your web application performance at all can directly result in a crash, say during a festive season. Similarly, not being prepared to handle an increased number of concurrent users can lead to server down time or a crash, costing companies a huge loss of time and money.

Performance testing is further a superset of load and stress testing. The technique of simulating actual user load on any programme or website is known as load testing. It examines the behaviour of the application under both light and heavy loads.
Stress testing is a type of testing that determines the stability and robustness of the system. Stress testing techniques use an auto-generated simulation model that tests the system under all theoretical cases.

To make the most out of performance testing, it is recommended that you test scenarios where the application might likely face issues. Such tests need to be simulated to align as much as to real world cases, like navigating the web app with a capped network or under different viewports.

Good tests are written by thoroughly studying all possible scenarios. The testers choose important use cases to test as well as certain particular scenarios the application is prone to face. If the actual behavior deviates from the expected behavior, they should identify what actions caused such deviation to learn why the performance is worsening in certain cases. After gathering a variety of examples, testers must devise strategies for simulating the necessary interactions. They will also provide the metrics that will be recorded while the test is being run.

A well-planned test is nothing if not executed in a suitable environment. A suitable environment could mean anything from making hardware configurations to setting up monitoring tools to assess the performance in real time, the environment should be as close as possible to a real world scenario. There are plenty of tools that help test the performance of a web application, like Blazemeter, Apache JMeter, LoadNinja and more.

The process doesn’t end after the tests are executed. The next important step is to collect and analyze the test results. These results can give you more insight regarding where the web app is breaking, what is causing delays in loading, what improvements to make, and the overall performance.

Such points can be utilized to fine tune or make improvements in the code, server configurations, or the system infrastructure depending on the logs of the test results.

Following the above steps would definitely give you much room for improvements and avoid closures due to traffic overload and other common issues. Since every professional web app is continuously updated with new features, it becomes increasingly important to repeat the above steps periodically to ensure a robust system.

Conclusion

Performance testing gives company managers access to a wealth of information, provides data for effective decision-making, and reduces the risks the team might face post the product release. On the other side, skipping important processes or stages of the process can deceive stakeholders and substantially exaggerate the performance of the final product. Performance testing guarantees a good customer experience and safeguards an investor’s investment. The testing expenses are typically more than offset by increased user satisfaction and retention.

Source: Plato Data Intelligence: Platodata.ai

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