Eggplant Blog

A surge in traffic is in many ways a dream for any website. After all, more traffic means more customers and more sales.

However, you can sometimes do your job too well when your successful marketing campaign brings surges of traffic, causing your website or app to slow down and even crash. There’s nothing more heartbreaking than seeing your website or app fail just when you have the most to gain.

Most blogs and articles just state traffic-induced crashes as something that can happen. But if you don’t understand how high traffic crashes a website or app, how can you expect to avoid the problem?

Performance testing just got a lot easier.

While delivering quality at scale is essential, simply setting up a performance test can be a challenging and time-consuming exercise, and then you need to analyze it. So, despite its importance, performance testing is not commonly used during development cycles.

“Effortless Performance Testing” in Eggplant Performance 9.0 changes all that, with a simple-to-use load testing capability that re-uses your existing Eggplant AI assets. So you can now run performance load tests on your system with no technical knowledge and no coding.

Many website owners are gearing up for their busiest time of year, with preparations well under way for the pre-Christmas rush.

Part of this means making sure the website is up and running throughout the peak period.

But it’s not just about availability.

Here are some essential steps to help you make sure your website delivers the best possible experience when it matters most.

Glastonbury remains the most in-demand UK festival so it’s no longer a surprise to see the website crash on mainstream ticket-release day. The 2019 event sold out in 30 minutes, with a record number of people trying to buy tickets.

While it may seem like a distant prospect, Black Friday is coming and retailers are busy preparing for the busiest shopping period of the year. The holiday season is normally a busy time for us too, as we start carrying out performance tests on retail sites to get an idea of how they’ll behave when unprecedented visitor numbers put systems under equally unprecedented strain.

Love it or hate it, Valentine’s Day is big business.

It’s hard to avoid the ads, the promotions and the special offers, all dedicated to getting us to part with our hard-earned cash in return for some romantic gesture or other.

Away from the high-street stores, the restaurants and the garage forecourts, many consumers were doing their Valentine’s Day shopping online

Welcome to the second in our short series of updates on the services we’ve been improving and delivering during 2017.

Last week, we saw how Grace used the Performance Analyzer API to build performance KPIs into the development and release process. This week, meet John, who’s doing a lot better than he was this time last year……

In the past few weeks, I’ve been getting daily emails about early access to retailers’ Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. Which got me thinking about two things: one, I hope retailers are prepared for the even earlier onslaught of online traffic, and two, the high stakes for site performance on the two busiest shopping days of the year.

It's that time of year again! Despite its questionable origins, Black Friday and the rush to find fantastic deals online doesn't seem to be slowing down at all... but can the same be said about your eCommerce website?

Black Friday, and, lest we forget the potentially more relevant Cyber Monday, are two very important dates for online retailers seeking to maximize profits. Site downtime has the potential to wipe millions of dollars off profits, especially if that downtime lands during the peak of the rush. However, outright downtime is not the only thing retailers should worry about.

Some of you may have attended our “Getting Started with Performance Testing” webinar a couple of weeks ago. The event was such a success, we’re doing it again! For those of you who missed it, make sure to sign up for the next session here. In the meantime, I’ll give you a taste:

In this webinar, we will run through the basics of performance testing. For a lot of folks just introducing test automation into their company (or even those who are already doing functional test automation), performance and load testing can be daunting.

To help alleviate the stress and clarify some first steps, we decided to run this webinar to help break down the basics for getting started. Steps for getting started include planning and preparation, test architecture, constraints, test creation/ recording, execution, and results.