There are many reasons why you should load test. Finding out that your site does not handle traffic peaks when it matters most is too late and can be very costly. It usually takes a lot of marketing spend to build traffic to a site. It makes no sense to fail to check if your site can handle that traffic. Your competitors are only a click away!

Load testing is an essential stage in the development process which ensures that your site doesn’t buckle under heavy load. We make this easy and cost-effective. We help you to verify the capacity constraints of your website, testing your site with any level of traffic to identify and diagnose performance issues.

Here are just some of the reasons to load test, regression test or ‘soak’ test:

• Something new: e.g. launching a new website;
• Making a change: e.g. moving data centres, adding new hardware, bringing on a third party, making configuration changes;
• Peak demand: e.g. planning a promotion and expecting high levels of traffic – or perhaps preparing for peak season;
• Problem diagnosis: e.g. trying to reproduce an intermittent issue;
• Planning for the future: e.g. capacity planning for the next few years or finding your breaking point.

Our customers consistently tell us that our load testing offers the perfect combination of flexibility, ease of use and affordability. It offers a range of key benefits:

• External perspective: we load test your website from outside your firewall, giving you a real understanding of how your customers experience its performance.
• Affordable: no licence required; no additional charge for extra users: with online access, any number of people can log in and observe or run tests.
• Flexible: tailored usage and pricing models: we provide 24 hour test windows during which you can run as many tests as you like against any number of sites. Run tests from the office, your home, your mobile or wherever you want. This feature is particularly useful if you are testing out of hours, or need to run tests at short notice.
• Multiple environments: You can test against production, pre-production, UAT, staging - any site that can be made publically accessible. This can be locked down to our dedicated range of test agent IPs.
• Straightforward managed service: We take away the pain. Tell us the user journeys to test and we will write and maintain the scripts. Our portal effectively self populates with a portfolio of ready to run scripts.
• Scalable: Regardless of the scale of your load testing requirements, we tailor our service to meet your individual needs. We cater for all types of tests, from one off, fully managed 50 user tests to large scale, complex projects involving multiple tests of 100,000 concurrent users or more.
• Powerful: Through fast and effective iterative testing, watch results come in live, make infrastructure configuration changes, re-test and compare results. See next section for more detail.

We give you direct access to results. There is no delay – results are available in real time whilst running a test. This means that you can act on the problems immediately.

When you’re running a test it is critical that you understand how your site is performing at the same time. Is the site responding correctly or are errors being returned? Do they correspond with behaviour you are observing? Our Load Testing allows you to do all of this whilst the test is still running, enabling a rapid test-tune cycle. If you discover a problem mid-way through a test, then you can fix it and re-run the test immediately to determine how successful the change has been.

Our reports are designed to suit all needs, whether you want a detailed breakdown or simply an overview of the results that are important to you. You can drill down to individual results, choosing the performance metrics you wish to compare e.g. DNS, Data Start (time to first byte), Connect, Content Download, in addition to the Total Download Speed. With easy results comparison, you can directly compare the results of two different test runs of the same scenario with a ‘before’ and ‘after’.

Our highly acclaimed, user-friendly load testing service allows you to control as much of the process as you wish. With Site Confidence, you can choose as much or as little help as you feel you need. And if that needs to be out of office hours, we can do that too. Our professional service offering includes:

• Pre Test Assessment (PTA): What are you trying to achieve with your load testing? We can help you to review your objectives, set appropriate testing goals, and guide your preparation of the testing itself. PTA is included with every first time load testing engagement with Site Confidence as we want to ensure your project meets its goal.
• Testing design and execution: If you don’t have the time or resources to run the test, and you want us to do it all for you, then we will do that. We can take your pre-planning objectives and turn them into well-defined testing scenarios (what and how you want to test). We can build those scenarios for you and run them whenever and however you want us to.
• Results analysis and interpretation: Our results are immediate and clear, so you can see what’s going on straight away, make changes to your infrastructure and run more tests to see what improvement that makes. But we can also give you a guided tour of your results through the portal, highlighting the most interesting findings. We can help you to understand what might be causing those results.
• Formal report: We don’t believe in big fat reports that take two months to write and end up collecting dust on your shelf! We never have, and we never will. But some of our customers do like to have a final report at the end of their load testing projects as a record of what they did and what happened. So if you want us to write one for you, no problems. We will make it clear, comprehensive and concise, ensuring that you learn from each project you do with us.

Load testing is a recurring requirement. As we work with you to deliver your load testing goals, we aim to transfer our knowledge to you so you can get the best out of our service for yourself. We provide comprehensive training in the use of our portal. When you conduct your next load test with us, you can choose to use as much or as little of our professional services as you need.