7 Ways Testing Can Prevent Your site from Crashing This Holiday Season

E-Commerce websites are the flavor of the season, what with excellent product variety and the convenience of shopping line being made available. For every Amazon and BestBuy remembered, however, there are just as many forgotten ones. This is because websites often do not take extra measures to test well before the planned period of sale and assure their customers a unified online shopping experience. Website services, apart from product details and shipping details, consist of closely interconnected functionalities that connect to a wide range of customers. At the time of transaction or while the customers are zeroing in on their purchases, a website crash or payment gateway error is every E-commerce website’s worst nightmare.

Here we take a look at 7 effective ways testing can prevent your E-commerce websites from crashing this holiday season.

1. Cloud Testing – Cloud testing is one of the most crucial factors to consider when looking to avoid website crashes, particularly during demanding times. Cloud testing does not require any hardware upgrades or support. While modelling multiple simultaneous connections, cloud testing services are available at the level you need, and also at any time you might require it. Cloud testing can be of ample help while modelling denial-of-service attacks and traffic. Cloud testing is a key part of testing. It leverages the IT investment, is simple, and handy. There is a certain amount of flexibility that is guaranteed with cloud testing, where real-time analytics are used and visual test environments can be created.

2. Load Balancing – Availability of the website, and the speed with which the website can be accessed are two very important objectives that must be ultimately achieved, to keep the performance of the website in check. Application delivery controllers, or server load balancers can be used in order to increase capacity, as well as reliability of applications. Testing is done by running of load tests to check the load-balancing in order to test the performance of the application under a specific load. Load balancers are typically of two types: hardware and software-based. Load balancing can also be done either manually (in the absence of software) or automatically.

3. Auto-Scaling – In synch with the load-balancing concept, auto-scaling in cloud computing is a method of controlling the number of servers that are being used according to the load generated. Scaling up is done in order to deal with more traffic onto the website during busy times, while scaling down permits the usage of far fewer servers as there is a certain lull in the website traffic. Testing of such scenarios, however, proves to be challenging and must be done carefully through the usage of multiple virtual IP addresses. Load balancing has direct impact on auto-scaling, and they are often used together, but can also be used in different situations.

4. Secure Payments – The importance of ensuring that payment gateways perform transactions seamlessly cannot be stressed upon enough. E-commerce businesses have the responsibility to ensure that all the pages which ask for customer details and other sensitive information are completely secure at all times. Investments must be made to enable payments to be conducted through secure servers that are SSL encrypted, or the like. Naturally, testing payment gateways is a bit of a challenge, mainly owning to the precision involved in the functionality. The most indispensable types of testing for payment gateway system are functional testing and integration testing, along with security testing.

5. Fault Tolerance – In this concept, redundant components, both hardware and software, take over when the usual components fail. In case one web server goes down, for example, another web server can take up the requests. Fault tolerance is basically the ability of the system to plough on, despite there being faults in the system. It is critical for firms while they endeavor to provide quality services in the midst of abnormal situations. This particular ability of software testing is raising stiff competition among software testing services providers. This is because, assessing faults and coming up with techniques to deal with these faults requires quite an
   in-depth understanding of the system and some expert analysis. Hence, this is often a job for highly skilled resources.

6. Prevention of DDoS attack – Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) refers to the inability to access a website or slow network performance. DDoS attacks are performed by an individual or a group of individuals by continuously interrupting the flow of services of a website. These attacks ultimately result in huge productivity losses for the website. Testing is essential in order to ensure that these attacks do not interrupt the services being provided by the host website. The ulterior motive of a DDoS attack is obtaining sensitive data from the host website. This could result in customers unable to logging in. Therefore, testing for DDoS mitigation is important to ensure that certain vulnerable points in the systems and servers are addressed in advanced.

7. Functionality Testing – This is an important criterion, as the functionality of the website is what the users would have to deal with first-hand. If the website is too cluttered with images, or has irrelevant information (for example, advertising a bed after a particular customer has already purchased one), or is unclear about terms and conditions or return policy, it would greatly affect the sales of the products. Promotions and site navigation are very important, as they directly generate revenue. Testing of all these aspects comes under functionality testing and is extremely essential for the website, to provide a seamless experience to the possible extent, for all of its customers.

In conclusion

Cigniti Technologies is an independent software testing services provider with an aim to assure quality for all of its clients. Cigniti understands the importance of working with its partners in order to provide a seamless testing experience for its clients. Leading analysts such as NelsonHall and Gartner have acknowledged the criticality of testing as businesses function with more complex IT environments, and are closely monitoring software testing providers in the market. When it comes to performance testing, Cigniti understands the importance of assessing the various factors that could have an impact on a website or application’s performance. BlueSwan, Cigniti’s proprietary testing services platform, was designed after thorough research, in order to cater to the various aspects of testing. To read more about BlueSwan, click here. To know more about Cigniti’s services, visit our company website.

Happy Holidays!