User experience is everything. When it comes to customer acquisition and retention, application performance is crucial. Design and functionality are important, but people can stumble through a less-than-perfect interface. However, nothing is more frustrating than a solution that is slow to respond.
The performance of your website or application is often the deciding factor between a satisfied customer and an angry ex-customer. If you don’t test performance adequately, you leave your solution’s success to little more than chance.
In today’s insight, I’ll look at four ways that performance testing with LoadRunner Cloud will help ensure your software applications are responsive, timely, and run smoothly under their intended workload.
1. Providing Adequate User Response Times
User response time is the duration a user has to wait for an application to react after an action, such as clicking a button or loading a page.
- Why It Matters for Customer Experience: A sluggish response will deter users, leading them to abandon the site or application. A study by Google found that as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds, the probability of the user bouncing increases by 32%.
- How Performance Testing Helps: Performance testing identifies bottlenecks in an application and allows teams to optimise them for quicker response times. This ensures users are met with swift, seamless interactions, increasing their satisfaction.
- Why Choose LoadRunner Cloud: With LRC, you can easily set up and execute sophisticated performance scenarios and assess system response times for many applications. Critically, it has world-leading analysis and reporting, including route cause analysis.
2. Handling Increased Load on Your System
System capacity refers to the number of users a system can handle simultaneously without compromising performance.
- Why It Matters for Customer Experience: You must handle long-term growth and spikes caused by patterns of use or unexpected events; think Glastonbury tickets, Black Friday, or a product suddenly going viral. An inadequate system can lead to downtime or severely compromised performance, affecting customer trust and brand reputation.
- How Performance Testing Helps: Load testing, a subset of performance testing, evaluates a system’s behaviour under increasing loads. It helps predict an application’s tipping point and whether the system can handle real-world demands.
- Why Choose LoadRunner Cloud: LRC offers unparalleled scalability. It allows for testing scenarios ranging from a few users to millions, ensuring your application can handle real-world challenges. Plus, with LRC, you can buy additional Vuser Hours for one-off tests or whenever you need additional performance testing above and beyond your normal Vuser volumes.
3. Maintaining Long Term Stability
Ensuring a system can perform consistently over extended periods is as crucial as handling traffic spikes.
- Why It Matters for Customer Experience: Issues like memory leaks can degrade system performance over hours or days, which may not be immediately noticeable but can lead to poor performance or unexpected failures.
- How Performance Testing Helps: Soak testing, another facet of performance testing, assesses how a system performs under a consistent load over an extended period. This helps identify potential long-term issues and ensures sustained performance.
- Why Choose LoadRunner Cloud: LRC Vusers licenses let you run performance tests for as long as you need, monitoring performance degradation over time or potential cliffs after a specific duration or transaction volume.
4. Understanding Real-World Network Performance
With businesses going global, it’s essential to ensure that an application performs consistently across various geographic locations and real-world conditions.
- Why It Matters for Customer Experience: Users from different regions might experience varied performance levels due to factors like distance from servers or local internet infrastructure.
- How Performance Testing Helps: Using tools that simulate traffic from different locations, performance testing can gauge geographic discrepancies and allow you to assess and refine performance for various locations and conditions.
- Why Choose LoadRunner Cloud: LRC includes Network Emulation. This lets you apply real-world conditions to your cloud-based load generators, including WAN, Wi-Fi, and Mobile options.
Choose LoadRunner Cloud for Performance Testing
Performance testing is only as effective as the tools you utilise, and LoadRunner Cloud stands out as the premier solution in the market, but without a premium price.
- Cost Efficiency: Given its cloud nature, LoadRunner Cloud eliminates the need for hefty infrastructure investments. You pay for what you use, ensuring cost-effectiveness while retaining top-tier testing capabilities.
- Best-In-Class Reporting: Post-test analysis is critical. LoadRunner Cloud provides time-saving, in-depth analytics and actionable insights. LRC lets you quickly pinpoint bottlenecks, understand system behaviour, and optimise effectively.
- User-Friendly Interface: Its intuitive design makes LoadRunner Cloud accessible to novices and seasoned testers. This ensures a smooth testing process and minimises the learning curve.
Improve Customer Experience with LoadRunner Cloud
While aesthetics and functionality are essential, a truly excellent customer experience cannot be achieved without ensuring robust performance.
Performance testing provides the insights and tools to optimise applications, ensuring they deliver consistent, fast, and reliable experiences to end-users, fostering loyalty and trust.
Other tools can generate load, but none have LoadRunner Cloud capability:
- Test a few users to millions
- Emulate network conditions
- Inflight, route-cause, and post-test analysis
- And so much more
Compare this to your current performance tool, do you have the solution you need?
