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When a website is launched, there are many things that strain its performance. Once the traffic begins to flow, the website will start receiving a large number of visitors and requests for pages. If you want to position yourself on the internet and rank well in search engines like Google and Bing, you need a web testing service to handle all this traffic.
Web testing and performance are all about real-world results. It is an essential factor for any website/app, to establish its success and facilitate a seamless user experience (UX). During the web app, testing performance is a key part of the digital journey that provides real feedback on site performance and user experience and ensures that the intended results are achieved. Test plans and test strategies should be created for each feature in a web application, such as slow loading speed, frequent time out/crashes, delayed response times, etc. should be segmented according to performance issues.
Web testing should also focus on security and accessibility issues as part of a complete QA strategy. For delivering an effective end-user performance it is critical that the web app be scalable, reliable, and robust. Therefore, for seamless performance, it is essential to measure performance testing metrics.
If you are trying to find out ways to measure the performance of your website and improve it, you will get it right here. This article will help you to cover some of the most important performance testing metrics that should be tracked. Before we begin it is important to have an overview of what is included in performance testing, what performance metrics mean, and why it is needed. So without any wait let’s begin.
Table of Contents
Performance testing
Performance testing is a non-functional application testing method used to evaluate the speed, scalability, reliability, responsiveness, and performance of an app or website. These performance testing types now help the app performance under varying network bandwidths, unstable user loads, etc. In performance testing, there are certain key performance indicators (KPIs), known as performance testing metrics, that are used to define the effectiveness of the performance tests.
Performance testing metrics
Metrics are parameters or measures collected during the testing processes. They can refer to different types of testing. These performance testing metrics allow the QA team to understand the effectiveness of performance testing, determine its success, and identify the critical areas in the application where improvements are needed.
In short, these metrics show how well an application is responding to real-user scenarios and managing user flow in real-time.
Why is it needed to Track Website Performance Metrics?
Performance testing is conducted to ensure that an application will run smoothly. Metrics are those indicators that help to identify what areas and features of the application require increased attention and quality enhancement. Tracking the result and comparing the actual and the expected performances is essential. It is also essential for the following purpose.
- Metrics are a set of data for the tests reflecting the current performance of the application, infrastructure, and network.
- They help to track the progress of the overall performance testing process.
- Helps to identify users’ actions and movements.
- Metrics enable a QA team to track and diagnose issues and measure them for finding a solution to improve the quality.
- Tracking metrics allow us to compare the results of tests and estimate the impact of code changes.
- Helps with the conversion rates.
- Helps in identifying the best traffic sources.
Important metrics to measure the performance of web testing
Web testing is a process that involves a number of stages. Each stage must be completed in order for your project to progress successfully. Performance testing is one of them.
Metrics are a key measurement and a vital tool to track and analyze the performance of your website There are 3 main metrics used to measure web testing. Page Speed, Server Load, and Bounce Rate.
1. Page Speed
Page speed is an important aspect of web testing. It is necessary to ensure that the website’s pages are fast and can load quickly, which leads to improves user experience
Web speed tools help in improving page load times, reducing the size of the page images, optimizing CSS and JavaScript files for faster performance, and helping to prevent potential errors from introducing slow downloads or awkward bugs.
There are two primary sources for page speed data that is Google Analytics and Google PageSpeed Insights. It shows you how to effectively audit your pages to improve overall speed. Let’s discuss then in short
Metrics in Google Analytics
Google Analytics shows metrics to get an idea of the rises and falls in the site performance. Under this comes.
- Page Load Time evaluates the time a site takes to fully load a page.
- Page Timings just tell which pages are slow without going into detail about why so. This helps admins see the average load times for individual pages.
Metrics in Google PageSpeed Insights
If Google Analytics measures what is wrong with the page speed, then Google PageSpeed Insights provides insight into the struggling parts of the website. It then provides PageSpeed Insights (PSI) reports on the performance of a page evaluated on websites or apps and provides suggestions on how to further improve the page. It includes a few other metrics like first contentful pain(FCP), speed index, time to interact, etc.
2. Server Load
Monitoring server load is an important task while managing a server’s performance. This metric is a window to your server’s health that tells you what’s happening on the server hosting your application thereby helping to identify and prevent inconsistencies that could affect the application performance and user experience. There are Server monitoring tools that enable this process by monitoring these standard server metrics, providing insights through reports and visualizations.
Server load for web testing is more about the website’s readiness for accepting large numbers of concurrent impressions. Web content will begin to load slowly as the number of requests increases. There are two types in this category. One is
- Client-side performance metrics.
- Server-side performance metrics.
Client-side metrics give end-to-end performance visibility in the application. A few client-side metrics to keep into consideration to ensure the optimal user experience are page load time, CPU idle time, render time, speed index, etc.
Server load metrics are also known as server-side metrics. In this, there are a few metrics to consider to monitor server and application health and performance. They are Server Availability and Uptime Metrics, Server Capacity Metrics, Application Server Monitoring Metrics, Server Load Sharing Metrics, System-Level Performance Metrics, Security-Related Metrics, etc.
3. Bounce rate
This metric refers to the number of visitors who are departing from your site shortly after arriving. It means that something is making users turn away without thoroughly exploring the site. Google calls such visits as single-page sessions. Since it serves as an indicator that the site isn’t delivering what it promised. In addition to impacting conversions and overall performance, a high bounce rate can negatively impact the search engine option.
Possible causes of high bounce rates are-
- Poorly targeted keywords,
- Slow load times
- Unpleasant graphic design.
- Pop-ups
- Unnecessary plug-ins
- Low content quality
- Non-mobile-friendly pages
Hence to lower the bounce rate there are some important metrics you can follow.
Assessing pages with the highest exit volumes
This helps in revealing the pages where people most often leave the site and also helps in knowing who is landing directly on an exit page or coming from another page on the site. Both kinds of evidence will help in making changes in improving the bounce rate.
Review In-Page Analytics
This helps in easily checking a page’s bounce rate by running the page through Google Analytics. This can help to review bounce and exit problems from different levels.
Check Time on Site
To understand your bounce rate data, it’s essential to do a cross-comparison with time-on-site metrics. Checking the time on site can help in determining whether a problem is throughout a site or just on a particular page.
Utilizing A/B Testing
When you Perform A/B testing it means creating two different pages for a product with different designs. And showing one page to half of the visitors and the second to the other half. The test results will reveal which ones work best in keeping the visitors for a longer time period.
Make the Pages readable Easy to Read
This is another important metric to get down the bounce rate. To make the site pages more inviting and easy to read it is advisable to use white space, larger font sizes, subheadings for breaking up content blocks, and shorter, easy-to-read paragraphs.
Website testing on LambdaTest real device cloud
In the real world, traffic comes from a crowd of devices both mobile and desktop, browsers, and operating systems. And the easiest way to test in real user conditions is to run web tests on real browsers and devices. By running tests on a real device cloud, ensure accurate results every time
LambdaTest is a continuous testing platform that allows testers to accurately test their website on real devices, browsers, and OSes. So whenever there is a requirement for cross-browser compatibility testing LambdaTest offers more than 3000 cloud-based real devices and browsers, and operating systems on demand to test the website in different combinations.
Using the LambdaTest platform testers can also run parallel tests on a Cloud Selenium Grid to get faster results without compromising on accuracy. Detecting bugs before they are caught by the users by testing the website in real-world circumstances. It provides comprehensive and error-free testing that ensures no bugs pass undetected into production, thus enabling websites to offer the highest possible levels of user experience.
Conclusion
From the above discussion, it is understood that continually measuring the performance metrics for web app testing is vital. Keeping an eye on the above-mentioned metrics and monitoring them regularly is very useful to know how successful the website is performing at any given time. and making improvements based on the metrics will help to maximize conversions and boost performance.
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