Load testing can have a transformative impact on business – enabling you to deliver a smooth and responsive experience to your web users, even in times of high demand. If you can avoid our top 5 most common mistakes, you’ll reap the rewards with better performance and customer experiences.

Load testing is often an afterthought for many commercial projects but if you integrate it throughout the development process you’ll reap the rewards when you launch a new site. We expore how to ensure a successful load testing programme when launching new sites, platforms or releases – from planning to production.

This year the Grand National was set to be the biggest betting turnover of all time with 71% of the adult British population expected to place a bet and is the equivalent to the volume of total number of bets across the four-day National Hunt Festival as Cheltenham. So exactly how did top horse racing betting sites cope with this unprecedented demand?

If you want to ensure trouble-free growth in your web traffic next year: there’s a helpful article at eConsultancy: How can you predict next year’s website traffic? I’ve pulled out some key tips, to help turn that into a plan for a realistic website load testing – helping to construct that plan is something every marketer should be involved in.

Hybris is a widely used eCommerce platform – a nice example of a European software company doing well. We’ve seen it in use at a number of our clients, and in the course of Hybris load testing at a few websites,

As long as there has been software, there has been testing. Good testing has always been centred on the business outcomes. It’s not just about finding bugs, it’s about finding Important Bugs: bugs that impact the end user or customer.

There’s a common theme in the world of technology, that mirrors wider life.

Whilst some in the real world will argue about the best football team or the best singer or the best ever romcom – in the tech world, the debate is more, umm,  detailed.

I just came out of an interesting load test planning meeting. It was with an organisation we’d worked with on web performance testing for some time, but this is the first time we’ll be doing major web load testing with them, as part of a bigger ITIL Capacity Planning delivery.

Like a number of companies, they have used LoadRunner in house for a few years, some of the guys in their test team are trained up on how to script in LoadRunner, and in LoadRunner best practise, etc.

What’s interesting is that they are moving away from LoadRunner, and calling on us to do the web load testing that they need.

As web performance testers, we regularly see subtle technical issues cause substantial failures in website user journeys -we expect the expected.

Whether in 24/7 monitoring, when our multi-user-journey approach routinely highlights that all areas of a web site may be functioning fine, apart from the one crucial  journey, maybe CheckOut: or Add to Basket.

Or if we’re running a web load test, it can sometimes result in a a whole site stalling: fortunately this normally happens only for brand new sites being load tested well before say a Christmas rush *.

Interesting bit of marketing spin this week from Marie Claire magazine – who reckon that their latest recommended must-have beauty product was so much in demand that it crashed the Boots.com web site!

Confidence in Boots takes a knock from that, doesn’t it? And today (3 days later) , the product is in stock.

Humm, kind of bad manners of them to tell tales on Boot’s website problems.