Black Friday is coming! Save the date: Friday 29th of November will be one of the busiest shopping days in the world this year. Billions of dollars will be spent, either at sales outlets or in e-commerce sites!
Black Friday: Season of crashes and slowdowns
It is an opportunity not to be missed for many companies all over the world. But Black Friday isn’t just about the pre-Christmas shopping season. It also involves massive slowdowns and crashes for many websites. Things you don’t want to happen on this particular day!
Slowdowns and crashes mean people will be leaving your website and checking out your competitors. It will dramatically damage your revenue and your brand image.
So, what should you do?
At Gatling Corp, we face this situation every year: people contacting us because their website crashed last year and they can’t afford that to happen one more time.
We won’t lie to you: unfortunately, within one month, there is no magic solution.
The long-term solution would be to do load testing throughout the entire year and even throughout your entire development lifecycle.
Gatling is designed to be integrated in your development pipeline and makes it easy to automate your load testing campaigns. Continuous load testing makes it possible to detect any performance regression at the earliest stage possible during the development of your web application.
But now is not the time for this! You only have one month left.
Quick-win tricks to improve your website’s performances
There are some quick-win tricks you can do within one month. So here are 5 simple things to do before Black Friday when you are in a hurry!
1. Check the rate of your website’s performances
You can find different tools to get an overall overview of your website’s performance and to optimize various aspects.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of tools that you could use:
GTMetrix
Yellow lab tool
Google PageSpeed Insights
2. Minify your assets
One way to quickly improve your website’s performances is to check if your assets are minified (js/CSS, compressed images). If not, you can find plenty of solutions to do that.
Minifying your assets will help you save a lot of resources.
To minify your images, you could use, for instance, Twic Pics. We met them at Station F (the world’s largest startups’ campus, in Paris, France).
3. Configure your cache
Don’t forget to configure your cache properly!
There are many solutions you could use to configure your cache. If you are using WordPress, you could have a look at WP Rocket.
4. Get a monitoring tool
Monitor your servers! Here again, there is plenty of different solutions you can find in the market. A monitoring tool get you live feedback of your production server but it is also very useful when you are doing load testing (see number 5!): you can then investigate your server-side metrics and your client-side metrics at the same time.
Prometheus, an open-source monitoring tool, is a solution we see more and more!
5. Load test your application with Gatling Enterprise
Of course, even if it is not the best practice to load test your application at the last minute, there are many things you can detect and eventually correct.
For instance, the load balancer itself can be the bottleneck of your application! Don’t forget to check this before the big day!
You have different strategies you can adopt for your auto-scaling. Don’t wait, hoping it is going to scale on its own. Make sure you configure your auto-scaling in advance regarding the number of users you expect to have on Black Friday!
Try https://gatling.io/enterprise/ , Gatling’s Enterprise version, to load test your application!
An exclusive Black Friday offer with Gatling FrontLine!
https://gatling.io/enterprise/ is Gatling’s enterprise version. It comes up with a centralized interface for all your load testing campaigns and with advanced features for integration. We made it easy to deploy several load injectors for your tests on your favorite cloud provider. You can then load test easily with as many virtual users as you want!
To prepare Black Friday properly, we have an exclusive offer for you: 2 weeks of unlimited testing with Gatling FrontLine in AWS Marketplace.
Fulfill the form below to get your free credits!
We hope you enjoyed this article! Feel free to send us some feedback!
The Gatling team
