How Can I Improve the Speed of My Website?

Well, you wanted to start an online business, congrats on getting there. Now, we have to make sure it can handle your customer volume. Moreover, nothing will earn you a disgruntled customer faster than a slow loading, or error generating experience. Today we will cover why the slow loading, the 404-errors, or the 500-errors can occur.

Stressed out webpage

This sounds odd to say, but this can happen, and happen quite frequently throughout the internet. Essentially, what happens is that too many people are accessing your page, or pages and the server simply cannot keep up. Therefore, the computer will display a generic error page (server error 500), or a 404 page not found error, as this means the server could not provide in a timely manner the next page. The result winds up being your customer's transaction declining, or a page failing to load on request. Either way, your customer will feel frustrated, and may lose faith in your company, site, or products.

Giving your site a stress test

For anyone who has ever had an echocardiogram this will be exactly the same thing for your site. Except in this case, the treadmill is going to be the simulated website hits, and other traffic essentially trying to see if you can make the website error. Most shopping carts, as well as from a website design side, are meant to withstand up to 100 concurrent users.

To test you could as cited in one example have 25 virtual users randomly browse the site, 25 more accessing the shopping cart, while 25 users remain logged in, and 25 virtual users are returning to your site to resume a purchase or browsing. This will test the site with 100 users, and while this is one test, you can adjust these numbers should your volume be higher than 100 customers for a certain time of day.

Results of the stress test

The results are in, and now you may have medicate your site. When the results come back, and they will come back in a pass or fail, now is the time to act. If your site failed to handle 100 customers you are going to want to discuss that with your web host, or your IT Manager immediately so that you can better manage your load balance for your site. Additionally, once you adjust the settings, re-run the load testing, and if that comes back pass, that is a win. One final thing to remember when running the stress testing is there is not one test right for every company. You will have to base this on your current or projected volume.