Holiday time is quickly approaching. If you own a digital business, you should prepare for the yearly spikes in activity and demand from your clients. While ten years ago that might’ve meant hiring temporary staff to help manage the holiday rush, most of today’s shopping and customer service happen online. According to the National Retail Federation of the United States, holiday sales in 2021 increased by 14.1% to a record $886.7 billion.

In the digital retail landscape, providing customers with an outstanding user experience (UX) when interacting with your brand or accessing your services online is essential to your success. But with the increases in online activities affecting the performance of your technology systems during the holiday season, the UX becomes far more challenging to maintain.

Therefore, to succeed—or even survive—this holiday season, you should implement an omnichannel performance testing strategy to ensure your systems can manage the load and continue to deliver the user experience necessary for your customers.

To minimize the possibility of slow service or system failure during peak traffic, you must also take a proactive approach to quality engineering. Begin measuring and improving your systems’ readiness for challenges before it’s too late.

Use Past Data to Predict Requirements 

Start by analysing data and gathering insights from previous holiday seasons. Then, use this to identify trends and predict scenarios that you’ll likely be facing this year. This will allow you to see patterns in online customer behaviour, expectations, and purchasing habits.

For example, you may find that your systems have faced the highest traffic at a specific time of day or a particular day of the week during the last few holiday seasons. These previous data points will enable you to prepare your system for the busiest periods.

You’ll also find channels that are most likely used for a specific activity. For instance, your mobile app may find customers using discount codes or vouchers, while your website could be popular among customers who want the items they purchase shipped abroad.

Look for as many trends as possible and feed them to the team responsible for supporting your software. By understanding patterns in advance, performance testing can be used to prepare your systems for upcoming workloads.

Ensure Your Digital Apps Will Perform 

When it comes to ensuring your digital applications will perform as required under the strain of holiday season traffic, there are a few key factors that you will need to consider in advance.

First, measure the performance capabilities of your critical system components, such as the server, database, and middleware. This will give you a comprehensive view of where bottlenecks may occur and will show you where you need to optimise to improve your site’s performance.

Additionally, it’s vital to measure web page load times and user-facing metrics. Such data will give insights into the user experience your customers will have when accessing your site and will highlight areas that need improvement.

• Background Jobs: Are background jobs for reconciliation, settlements, and other purposes slowing down your apps due to high data processing volumes? Include background job scenarios as part of your workload model.

• Special Offers: Special offers are much more common during the holiday season. Be sure to conduct thorough tests on the functionalities of your website and reinforce that your systems can handle increased loads.

How to Further Reduce Your Risk 

Performance testing can be difficult for an average business, especially with many channels to worry about and the complexity of tying them all together. However, with something as important as application performance, it’s often wise to work with a trusted, experienced partner who can provide you with specialist guidance and expertise.

As a leading provider of performance testing and quality engineering services, our team here at Testhouse has a proven track record of reinforcing retail systems to manage customer loads of more than half a million users.

Our team has successfully managed end-to-end performance testing for global businesses in the retail, banking, government, education, and healthcare sectors. All our clients came to us with one requirement in common: the need for robust and scalable solutions to support their large user bases.