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This year’s underperforming retailers share three common mistakes:
- load testing isn't properly prioritized;
- key stakeholders aren't involved in the load testing process; and
- load testing isn't conducted from the end user’s perspective.
In contrast, this year's most successful retailers have taught us several key lessons (applicable to any peak traffic event) which can help others realize a profitable holiday season. These lessons include the following:
1. Early and thorough planning is critical to your online success. You must allocate the appropriate time and effort to execute an effective load test. Otherwise, your load testing is rushed, ineffective or incomplete. These tests must take into consideration what pages, applications, customer segments and geographies need to deliver the best performance. By solving these problems first, you'll engineer a more streamlined, strategic load test that identifies the most critical (and potentially costly) bottlenecks. You'll also have adequate time to address these issues.
2. Both marketing and IT execs must be considered in the plan. Before executing a load test, define what constitutes acceptable performance. Conduct the test based on those parameters. Representatives from your marketing team should be involved so they can share information on anticipated sales and growth projections in order for the load test to be scaled properly. Likewise, representatives from your IT department must communicate the capabilities and limitations of the environment, not so much in terms like network capacity and CPUs, but how heavy loads will impact the end user experience given the realities of the current infrastructure.
Ensuring effective web performance is a shared marketing and IT responsibility. Through informed, proactive communication, marketing and IT execs can ensure the best possible end user experience within an acceptable cost structure.
For example, let’s say your marketing team wants to add new site content, such as graphics or video, during an anticipated period of peak traffic. The IT team can then demonstrate how the addition of this content will likely impact the end user experience under load for critical revenue-generating applications. This type of cost/benefit analysis can expand to cover various factors such as third-party services investment, internal resources and potential downstream influence on performance. Ultimately, this will help you achieve a critical balance between website functionality and performance — one that aligns to end user expectations.
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