Customer experience begins with a web application that responds quickly. As consumer demand for technology increases, so do expectations of speedy interactions. From banking to eCommerce to healthcare, technology continues to both enhance peoples lives and drive them to be faster and do more.
What does this mean for companies? First it means that uptime has to be as close to 100% as absolutely possible. It also means that in today’s economy a 6 second response time is becoming less and less acceptable.
The potential impacts of poor performance
Immediate loss of revenue: If customers cannot get through the checkout process quickly, the sale is lost and they have gone on to purchase from another company. In cases with service providers, SLA penalties may also be associated with an outage.
Headlines: Healthcare.gov showed the country what a failed rollout looks like. The negative press related with a major rollout is a cost far greater than the immediate loss of revenue. Customers will be lost, the brand will suffer. This impact on the brand will take time to repair, time that most companies don’t have.
Resource costs: A downed site creates a lot of finger pointing and uncertainty. Cleaning up after an outage can be expensive and stressful for all parties involved be it internal staff, vendors, or customers. The costs of this situation analysis, rework, and possibly staffing can be expensive factors.
Factors in performance
Traffic: As your business becomes more and more successful, your traffic grows and the load on the servers increase. Load balanced servers and distributed networks help, but even those architectures will need to be tested.
Complexity: The complexity of technology continues to increase at unprecedented levels. Integrated systems alone are major factors in performance testing. As systems connect, and flex, the complexity of those systems can cause major issues. Keeping track of exactly what systems are working together at any given time can be a complicated task. Doing a full performance test will uncover potential issues before you launch.
Security: With all of the headlines in 2014 about data breaches, security is becoming more and more scrutinized. Adding security to sites will help protect users, but what impact does that have on performance?
How to feel feel confident in your technology
Not knowing if your technology solution will stand up is an unsettling feeling. Performance testing builds confidence by finding issues before end users do. For a fraction of the cost associated with an application / infrastructure capacity failure performance testing can provide all the necessary tests, optimizations and infrastructure scaling requirements to prevent any possible capacity failure.