Make Testing A Real Reality Check

To know how your site will perform for users dispersed across the country or the world

, testing must be done over the Internet, from the same geographic locations as your users, not from behind the firewall. Theres simply no way to simulate the vagaries of Internet backbones, third-party content feeds, CDN performance, and signal transmission through the critical last mileunless you are at the end of that mile, with a browser.

With testing agents dispersed where your users are, you get an accurate picture of variations in performance, and overcome the danger of looking at averages. An average page-load time of three or four seconds may seem OK, but that kind of average could mean your page is loading in one second for someone in New York, but taking six or more seconds for someone in Chicago. And that is not likely to be acceptable. The solution is to test from multiple, geographically dispersed locations, look at the data, and address any local or regional bottlenecks.

Staff up and stock upon caffeine and capacity

Retailers who put off load testing can look forward to many sleepless nights in October and early November as they try to get their sites up to speed. But even the best-in-class retailers can count on a sleepless night or twoparticularly Thanksgiving nightas they stay up to make sure all their hard work has paid off.

One of my biggest clients spent the night at headquarters on Thanksgiving night last year, Foss says. Hes up all night making sure everything is running perfectly, and goes home Black Friday morning at 9:00 a.m.

The holiday shopping season is the culmination of many hard hours of work for the IT/Web department. And no matter how well things are planned, no matter how rigorously everything is tested, theres always the chance that the unexpected will happen and something will go wrong. So it makes good sense to have technical personnel on hand and on call during all the critical shopping periods to handle any emergencies, and to have extra computing capacity standing by just in case its needed.

Dont wait another minute

If you havent started load testing your site yet, theres no time to lose. The most successful retailers look at holiday readiness as an ongoing process, says Crocker. They start in January and they test and they monitor performance and they benchmark and they trend all the way through until the end of December.

And December is just a few short months away.

by: Chris samuels

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