Prepare for the unexpected!
Load testing is used to measure the upper limits of your web server and determine where your individual threshold lies. If you’re a high-traffic media publisher that sees a lot of volatility around a hot article going viral or you’re launching a major campaign, simulating traffic will give you a direct look into how your VPS will hold up. Once we have an understanding of performance and when to expect your server to begin wavering, we can help formulate the right strategy for success.
Using a 3rd Party Load Testing Service
If you have a load testing partner already in mind, great! We’d be happy to work with them. If you need some direction, we have a few select facilities we can recommend you use.
Before setting up your environment and selecting a load testing tool, please contact us first by opening a support ticket to discuss which solution we feel is best for your testing needs. As soon as your server’s ready, we’ll provide whitelisting of your IP addresses so you can start testing without setting off our security alerts. Once we have the results of your tests, we can fine-tune and offer recommendations for optimizing your sites, to give you the best performance available.
Setting Up Your Load Testing Service
As you begin the testing phase, it will be important to make sure you simulate the actual traffic pattern of your real traffic. For example, if your users will be hitting the site and adding items to their cart and going through a checkout process, sending a bunch of traffic to the homepage won’t be an accurate reflection of performance. Most services let you simulate the traffic patterns to an extent, so it’s going to be a matter of determining what that is exactly, and testing with that behavior in mind.
Leverage Our Team of Experts
We will review your load testing results and help build a playbook for addressing any inefficiencies that are identified. Some baseline items we first look for are:
- verify cached content performance,
- image optimization, and
- search performance.
These are all important factors in achieving max productivity of your server’s resources. Pagely’s Ops team will make any minor tweaks as needed to bolster your site for performance improvements.
Resizing Your Web Server
Running load tests ahead of a website launch, or special event, can help you set more informed expectations around performance during your peak traffic times. If you’re anticipating a spike in traffic around a scheduled event, upgrading your plan is easy and we offer these on a temporary basis to ensure your users are served successfully once they hit your site. We’re here to help you determine the right size plan based on your load test results.