More often than not, you need to perform tests on your website to make sure that it performing as well as it should. And then, you need to do tests to see if it will withstand future – unforeseen – events and accidents. This future-proofing of your website ensures that it doesn’t buckle under pressure at the time you need it to be up and running the most: when your business starts to take off and you experience a sudden surge of traffic and usage. It would be disastrous to let your potential clients down, just right after they have discovered you.

Well, you might also think that it couldn’t happen to your website simply because you had put careful planning and consideration of steps when you first built your site.

Fair enough; but no matter how good or robust your planning and developing is, you will never be 100% sure if your site will be able to withstand the pressure come the day of reckoning when it will be flooded with visitors and, if it has an app, will be inundated by requests.

Scalability testing makes sure your site and any apps running on it can handle an increase in the number of people that are accessing them and that, should it occur, no compromise is incurred at the time.

For example, you can test if your site is accessed within the right amount of time or if will crash when it reaches a certain limit. While you can often take a guess and assume (and hope) you are right, you will never be certain until you have tested it all.

Always remember, scalability testing isn’t just about the number of people your website can handle but how it acts at every interval of the test – as you pile on the number of people accessing it.

The main points you will test for well-performance will actually be:

Response Times: the time it takes the web site or application to respond to user requests.

Throughput Times: the time or rate at which something can be processed. In case of your site, this would be the time it would take for it to serve the required information to your visitors after performing a “backend” job.

Processor Usage: how much of your CPU would you need when running the site at its maximum capacity? Do you have it available?

Now that we know what scalability testing is, let us see how you can use it to strengthen your business website.

Good News

You will be glad to know that there are hundreds of websites out there, and to perform your test all you need to do is submit your link to them. They return the relevant data for you to look at and analyze. After sending a series of server requests (simulating) your visitors, they will be able to deduce relevant information that includes:

Requests per Second: as you watch the stress test, you will see the number of requests per second that are being sent your site’s way. The more requests your site handles, the better.

Concurrent Users: the test will also increase the number of people that will simultaneously be able to access your site. The higher it is, the better your site is at handling traffic.

Peak Response Time: the peak response time should be very low (or as low as possible) and remain there as the number of requests and concurrent users rises. This shows your site has ample resources and can handle decent-to-inflated amounts of traffic and requests. The moment the time starts to increase you should realize it is at that exact point you need to focus on increasing the resources available to the site (RAM, bandwidth, disk space, etc.).

Errors Encountered: your website doesn’t have to crash completely to turn your visitors away. If their user experience is fraught with halting and intermittent service, they will eventually give up and make a U-turn. These tests will point out which of your pages have errors while loading or resolving. You should take note of them and remedy the errors ASAP.

Analyze It

Once you have all the required information at hand, it will simply be a matter of sitting and analyzing it all. With the information at hand you can determine whether or not your site is ready to handle growth and if so, up to what limits.

Compare your current traffic and usage with the “breaking point” that you have arrived at from the tests. If you have already reached (or are approaching the limits) then there is no time: you need to do some serious upgrades right now.

If you are still safe, you can take the time to calculate when you will reach those limits and implement a scalability plan to handle it when the time comes.