For every second that your website spends loading its data, it loses one more valuable viewer. If you are a person who handles a business through your website or an online portal, that user could have probably been one of your biggest clients, but you will never know because they didn’t want to deal with long load times.
To be honest, it isn’t just that person’s fault. Sure the viewer’s internet speed determines greatly how fast website loads but there’s a lot that can be done on the other end to ensure that people don’t just close the tab before actually looking at your website.
Stress testing is a brilliant way to make sure that your site maintains maximum viewership while keeping efficiency. But stress testing; one can find out how much bandwidth their site can handle. Stress testing is usually conducted by sending multiple requests to the server to observe the limit that the site can handle. However, professional stress testing can be extremely hard to do if you are coding the program it yourself, especially if you aren’t a seasoned programmer. Also, professional stress testing can be extremely expensive. Fortunately, free stress testing software and websites exist to aid you in making your website more efficient and free. However, free services aren’t always enough and you may want to load test your website using a paid service. Some of the free services include tools like HP’s LoadRunner (to an extent), and some of the free tools are things that you can install on your server from companies like Apache.
Services like Web Polygraph provide you with all the necessary tools to test the speed of your site. This service also helps you catch proxies, carries out origin server acceleration and helps you with any additional resources you would need to conduct the stress test.
Being able to test out the server response time efficiently and the bandwidth limits of a website is a highly useful tool in the world of website development. For the amount of time it takes to stress test a website (which isn’t much, to be honest), it’s surely a good tradeoff for some views you will get additionally – solely due to a faster more optimal website.