Black Friday is coming up and you need to act now to make sure your store can handle the rush. Web developers tend to focus on page load speeds using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix but rarely do they test for concurrency. Don’t let your WooCommerce store turn your black ink red during the busiest shopping day of the year. Prepare your site now.
In this blog post, we’re going to explore the ways you can speed up WooCommerce for Black Friday and survive the Shark Tank Effect:
- How to use Supervisor.com to load test your WooCommerce Store
- Make sure your store can withstand the surge in traffic
- How Convesio can help
Let’s start with how to load test WooCommerce store with Supervisor.com.
Meet Supervisor.com: AI-powered load testing for eCommerce and SaaS
We picked Supervisor.com because it’s easy to use and it’s based on bots using real browsers to simulate users. The use of real browsers creates a test environment that’s very similar to the loads created by concurrent real-world users on your site. The AI ensures that the simulation is realistic and not just a script being run to replicate the same behaviors over and over again.
The process
Go to Supervisor.com’s website and start off with the free test on offer, so you will familiarize yourself with the process. Before doing so, there’s a little prep to go through:
- Preparation — Make sure you test during a time when a slow-down of your site won’t be an issue
- Inform Your Hosting Provider — If you’re planning to test a significant level of concurrency let your host know. They may have security systems in place that are triggered by unexpected behaviors.
- The Goal — Determine the max number of concurrent users during Black Friday
- Load Test — Perform the test using Supervisor.com. It’s free to test with up to 50 concurrent users.
- Check Page Load Speed – Check before your test as well as at any point during the test when the graph shows that the site is starting to struggle.
Understanding the results
As an example, we’ve looked at the results of a WooCommerce site in the marine tech space.
Here’s a breakdown of what you see in the graph:
- Horizontal lines — Page load time, in seconds
- Numbers at bottom of the graph — The number of concurrent users
- Vertical axes — The exact time when all data points were measured
- Topline — Slowest page load times
- Middle line — Average page load times
- Bottom line — Fastest page load times
