Wagento is a group that specializes in eCommerce development, SEO, marketing, web design and much more. As you could have guessed from their name, they’re masters of the Magento platform, and they’re constantly solving problems for their ever-growing list of great clients.
In this case, Wagento needed load testing, so they turned Load Impact.
You want your eCommerce site to get a lot of traffic and convert a lot of sales. One problem: Are you sure your website and servers can stand up to the pressure?
At Wagento, we work with great companies around the world to design, build and upgrade their eCommerce sites and help their businesses grow — and with growth, comes more customers and more website visitors.
We recently had a client learn the hard way that a rush of website visitors can actually turn into a mess if you haven’t been load testing your site.
The client was rolling out a new theme, and a wave of incoming traffic degraded service so badly that service eventually grinded to a halt.
But quickly after the client’s website broke, Wagento leaped into action and enlisted the help of Load Impact.
First, we used data from Load Impact, New Relic and Google Analytics to find out exactly what users were doing when they visited the site and the rate in which they were doing it.
Next, Load Impact helped us figure out how many visitors our client’s site could handle without service slowing down or reaching the breaking point again. Load testing also helped us pinpoint how many servers the client would need to handle existing and new traffic.
Load Impact's real-time charts make it easy to understand the way your website responds to active clients
A key metric was making sure the ERP system could handle a load of incoming orders. With the help of Load Impact, we devised a plan to generate Virtual Users (VUs) and simulated orders to stress the website and servers.
Using Load Impact’s tools, our VUs closely mimicked real customers and produced 14 clicks on the website over five minutes, including adding items to the cart and going to the checkout page.
Our final load testing push really put the site and servers to work.
Load Impact created 1,000 VUs (per server) and generated 1,000 orders per hour. We used a stepped approach — meaning the orders gradually increased and plateaued at the 30-minute mark. We believe this gave us maximum impact on the server to test its resilience at a constant load.
We were in touch with the Load Impact Support team throughout our testing, and they were able to help us get some crucial scripting items updated quickly and efficiently. Overall, the entire process of load testing our client’s website was streamlined by Load Impact's great Customer Success team.
Wagento already delivers a wide range of eCommerce solutions to our clients, and now, we have a ready-made solution for clients looking for load testing in Load Impact.
All in all, it’s just another way Wagneto delivers Enterprise-level website solutions to clients of all sizes.
Brent Peterson is the Chief Magento Evangelist and Agency Coach at Wagento. He has progressed through the ranks html, ASP, .net, MSSQL and finally Magento. Open source has taught him that working together is better than working in a silo. He loves to run, bike, ski and sometimes swim, in that order. He is often found at Magento events running meetups with his wife Susan. You can tweet him @brentwpeterson
If you want to learn more about this topic, we recommend the checklist for ecommerce performance testing.