The Five Best Practices for Optimum Web Performance

Before, During and Beyond

Keynote, a mobile and Web cloud testing and monitoring company based in San Mateo, CA, recommends five best practices for ensuring optimum Web performance. This also extends to performance across desktop, tablet and smartphone devices:

1. Run a dedicated, cross-functional readiness team.
2. Load test in production ' across desktops, tablets and mobile.
3. Analyze transaction performance, end-to-end.
4. Monitor ongoing performance with simulated and real user techniques.
5. Plan for contingencies.

Cross-Functional Readiness Team

Companies that take website preparation seriously for any seasonal or high traffic event think about scalability and performance across the entire business ' including development, Web operations, IT systems, marketing, sales, etc. While Web Ops takes primary responsibility for website readiness, regular meetings with the core group of stakeholders is critical to ensure getting the inputs needed. It voices not just technical issues but broader issues, such as the overall customer experience or supply chain readiness.

Production Load Testing

Everybody tests their website, right? This may be true, but the real question is whether those tests truly validate that a website will perform well under peak traffic. The only way to know this is to simulate the expected number of visitors and their journeys through the site with real Internet traffic in production. Production environments are larger scale, and depend on different external systems than a staging or test environment. Testing services that use transactions generated from the cloud can replicate the conditions that actual customers will experience in production. This type of load testing models customer behavior, and the ways in which users continually arrive on a site during peak events, no matter if on a laptop, smartphone or tablet.

End-to-End Transaction Performance Analysis

Thorough Web load testing will result in errors and bottlenecks ' maybe even a full-scale crash ' and that's a good thing! The objective is to identify issues with garbage collection, cacheing, database connectivity and much more. This step also allows for collecting a large amount of data. If tested correctly, this provides enormous insight into network, infrastructure and application performance.

Ongoing Simulated and Real User Monitoring

Going into a website peak period, anticipate change and keep testing and monitoring for its impact on performance. One tip is to maintain a consistent baseline of clean-room measurements against which to benchmark performance. These measurements provide the guidance to identify issues. Augment this monitoring with performance measurements collected from actual user visits. In this respect, you have both simulated and real user monitoring data to provide benchmarks of optimum performance.

Contingency Planning

Despite the best testing, no system is perfect. Problems happen, sometimes out of the control of a site owner. Make sure you've designed your site so that it can gracefully handle system failures. Even if one of your vendors or external systems goes down, you need to be able to function, even if impaired, so your customers stay on your site and continue to place orders. If you need to then make the site unavailable to fix what can't be fixed while live, try to do so late at night (or even in the wee hours) to limit the pain of the site being down.

Conclusion

Exceptional Web performance do-es not happen by chance. It must involve a cross-functional team. Start the testing early and often and know there will still be challenges. And be ready to keep making corrections once the site is live.

Aaron Rudger is senior marketing manager for Web performance at Keynote, a mobile and website testing and monitoring company. He is responsible for articulating Keynote's Web performance monitoring strategy and validating it with customers, analysts and partners. Rudger has more than 15 years of experience in the CRM, IT Management and ecommerce industries. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @Keynotesystems. e-Commerce Law & Strategy readers can sign up for a free weekly e-mail of the latest Keynote Retail Performance Index that can track a company's performance against the competition, or just to follow what some of the major names are setting as performance standards (there are also indices for specific vertical retail categories). See, http://bit.ly/1gKYwUh.

It's the annual shopping rush ' Black Friday and Cyber Monday are only the beginning of the run up to Christmas. For major online retailers especially, this is make or break time. Is your site ready?

Website performance has ne-ver been so prominently in the news lately. It's a sobering reminder of how to prepare for and then fix “on the go” major sites supporting not just large amounts of traffic, but also large amounts of transactional activity.

What are the best ways to avoid a website meltdown?

Before, During and Beyond

Keynote, a mobile and Web cloud testing and monitoring company based in San Mateo, CA, recommends five best practices for ensuring optimum Web performance. This also extends to performance across desktop, tablet and smartphone devices:

1. Run a dedicated, cross-functional readiness team.
2. Load test in production ' across desktops, tablets and mobile.
3. Analyze transaction performance, end-to-end.
4. Monitor ongoing performance with simulated and real user techniques.
5. Plan for contingencies.

Cross-Functional Readiness Team

Companies that take website preparation seriously for any seasonal or high traffic event think about scalability and performance across the entire business ' including development, Web operations, IT systems, marketing, sales, etc. While Web Ops takes primary responsibility for website readiness, regular meetings with the core group of stakeholders is critical to ensure getting the inputs needed. It voices not just technical issues but broader issues, such as the overall customer experience or supply chain readiness.

Production Load Testing

Everybody tests their website, right? This may be true, but the real question is whether those tests truly validate that a website will perform well under peak traffic. The only way to know this is to simulate the expected number of visitors and their journeys through the site with real Internet traffic in production. Production environments are larger scale, and depend on different external systems than a staging or test environment. Testing services that use transactions generated from the cloud can replicate the conditions that actual customers will experience in production. This type of load testing models customer behavior, and the ways in which users continually arrive on a site during peak events, no matter if on a laptop, smartphone or tablet.

End-to-End Transaction Performance Analysis

Thorough Web load testing will result in errors and bottlenecks ' maybe even a full-scale crash ' and that's a good thing! The objective is to identify issues with garbage collection, cacheing, database connectivity and much more. This step also allows for collecting a large amount of data. If tested correctly, this provides enormous insight into network, infrastructure and application performance.

Ongoing Simulated and Real User Monitoring

Going into a website peak period, anticipate change and keep testing and monitoring for its impact on performance. One tip is to maintain a consistent baseline of clean-room measurements against which to benchmark performance. These measurements provide the guidance to identify issues. Augment this monitoring with performance measurements collected from actual user visits. In this respect, you have both simulated and real user monitoring data to provide benchmarks of optimum performance.

Contingency Planning

Despite the best testing, no system is perfect. Problems happen, sometimes out of the control of a site owner. Make sure you've designed your site so that it can gracefully handle system failures. Even if one of your vendors or external systems goes down, you need to be able to function, even if impaired, so your customers stay on your site and continue to place orders. If you need to then make the site unavailable to fix what can't be fixed while live, try to do so late at night (or even in the wee hours) to limit the pain of the site being down.

Conclusion

Exceptional Web performance do-es not happen by chance. It must involve a cross-functional team. Start the testing early and often and know there will still be challenges. And be ready to keep making corrections once the site is live.

Aaron Rudger is senior marketing manager for Web performance at Keynote, a mobile and website testing and monitoring company. He is responsible for articulating Keynote's Web performance monitoring strategy and validating it with customers, analysts and partners. Rudger has more than 15 years of experience in the CRM, IT Management and ecommerce industries. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @Keynotesystems. e-Commerce Law & Strategy readers can sign up for a free weekly e-mail of the latest Keynote Retail Performance Index that can track a company's performance against the competition, or just to follow what some of the major names are setting as performance standards (there are also indices for specific vertical retail categories). See, http://bit.ly/1gKYwUh.