Load Testing Your Nonprofit Website

Every website needs to have as much load testing done as possible because you have many things that you need to know about the site before you dive in and start to use it. You cannot go live without knowing anything about the site, and you also need to know what you can do to make the site better. The tester will help you get your site ready to go live, and they will give you a lot of advice that you need to make it better.

You are responsible for all the things that happen on your site, and you cannot make it any better if you are not testing it. The testing tells you all that you need to know, and you have to know that you are going to be able to handle all the traffic that you get. The site will crash if you have not tested before, and it will be very hard to maintain if the only thing you are doing is running it without knowing how far you can push it. The smart thing to do is to make sure that you have asked the tester what to do when they write your report.

Remember that it is easier for you to do this than it is to have your site crash, and you can get them to do this for you often to make sure the site is solid. You need to go live with a site that you know you can take care of, and you need to have a site that is going to help you make sure that you have all your customers getting a good experience. There are a few URLs that you can visit to run a load test on your site to ensure that it can handle the visitor level that you’re after. One is www.dotcom-monitor.com/load-testing, and another is Apache’s Jmeter (jmeter.apache.org).

Ask the testing company how often they want to do this, and then see if there is a way for you to have the reports sent to you at once. You can have a look at them, and then you will learn what you can do to improve your site. You might need to do a lot of things to make it ready for more traffic, and you will learn that you can keep up with the traffic.

Finally, if you’re looking to speed up your nonprofit website or run a load test on it, you can use the tools mentioned above as well. Another thing that you can do is get better hosting as it will most likely be faster in terms of the page rendering speed of the servers. You can visit WebHostingBuddy.com to learn more about that, or you can also check out Athena Software’s performance blog.

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Load Testing and Stress Testing – Why Every Webmaster Should Do It

When a person develops a website they want to make sure that the people visiting the website has the best possible experience. If a webpage is slow to load or freezes this leads to an unpleasant experience. The visitor will not come back and they will tell others about their negative experience. It is important that a webmaster perform stress tests as well as performance tests to see how their webpage is performing. This will allow them to make changes if needed.

Performance testing will allow the webmaster to see how their site is performing. They will be able to see how reliable their site is and how it performance. They will notice any issues about the development and design of the site. This will allow them to make some changes.

Load testing will allow the user to see how their site performances and the number of people that can visit to page at one time before problems happen. This will allow the webmaster to know how many visitors can use the site without any issues.

When a webmaster is stress testing their site they are looking to find out how many activates can be completed at one time with the resources that are found on the site without the system breaking. Negative testing will remove some components that are found on the site to see how the site is performing and what features may be affecting the site. This will allow the webmaster to test specific applications on the site. This testing will allow the webmaster to see what makes their site fail and how well the site is able to recover from this failure. This also takes in consideration the time that it takes the site to reload. A person will also be able to test the site in a number of unexpected situations. There are a lot of different services that allow you to do this, such as LoadView (check out their site here) and Redline 13 (see their site here).

These tests will allow the webmaster to look at any issues a user may be experiencing with the webpage. This will be able to test for these issues. They will able be able to go back and fix the problems that the site is having to improve user experience.

10 Ways to Make Your Website Better for Users

Performance and speed on a site are what determines if the website will be visited second and third time by the user. Users go to sites that have a high response activity with a click seconds, not minutes. Loading in the website should not lead to its poor performance. The following ways will help any website owner improve their site for better user number:

1. Learn to maintain the number of clients in the site; sometimes when many users are visiting a set at the same time, it tends to slow down. Enhancing the website means ensuring proper server connectivity for the website all time.

2. Load testing the site; before the website is taken to the real clients, it is advised that the website is tested to identify how it will respond to a couple or a large number of customers. Load testing gives you the website owner an opportunity to feel first what the client will and possibly make changes if required.

3. Put yourself in the user shoes when improving a website and consider what factors would be high to a user when presented in a website.

4. Consider issues that attract the users to a site and use them to get use attention. How well a site performance is dependent on the number of users who are satisfied with it.

5. Read other sites that have a massive user flow and compare to your site to know what factors attract users to them.

6. Stress test; conduct a stress test before taking your domain to the public. When a site fails on you is much better than failing while for user use. The stress test is vigorous, but it helps identify a what point the site can break down or collapse. Also, it helps the site owner analyze risks.

7. Unique and originality; users, love unique materials, and that will attract them to the location more than annoying SEO content. Also, follow Google rules for SEO content and it will work magic.

8. Make the site compatible with mobile phones. In that, a user can access it through their device makes it better for them.

9. Simplicity – a good website is simple but impressive it is what will wipe off the competition in the market.

10. Provide the most reliable information, current and enjoyable. What helps most is to keep updating new and engaging information.

How to Improve the Load Speed of Your Website

If you are a professional web designer, internet marketer, or even a casual blogger: The speed at which your website loads is one of the most important factors to determine the number of views your page will receive. Page load speeds, according to Google, now even impact your overall search engine optimization (SEO) rankings. If you are serious about your site, you need to be serious about stress testing it to minimize loading times.

One of the first things a web designer should do when optimizing their site’s speed is optimizing all of the images on their site in order to reduce file size. There are a number of free and paid programs available that will assist the developer in managing the size of their image files without sacrificing the inherent quality of the images. One of the best image optimization tools out there is Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop has long been the de facto standard for web graphics and the built-in algorithm used to minimize file sizes is one of the best around. However, because of the high cost of Photoshop, many amateur web enthusiasts will turn to the open source alternative to Photoshop called, Gimp. This program offers many of the same features as Photoshop and includes a file reduction algorithm almost on par with the one offered by Photoshop. Best of all, The Gimp is absolutely free to use.

Another crucial element in reducing your page’s loading speed is compressing the Javascript functions being used by your site. Today, most websites will have at least 3 different Javascripts running on page simultaneously and each one will add additional load time to your site. Luckily, there are a number of free websites that offer the ability to reduce the size of your scripts by several kilobytes per script. If your site is running multiple scripts per page, this can equate to a massive reduction in the time it takes someone to see your page loaded completely. Reducing the size and number of Javascript instances on your page can even help when load testing your server (click here to learn more about how to test this).

One of the best sites to “Minify” Javascripts is JSCompress.com. JS Compress has an extremely easy to use interface that any amateur web designer will have no trouble adapting to.

While there are other ways to further reduce the overall size of your website, these two are some of the worst offenders in terms of slow loading pages. If you simply optimize both your images and Javascripts on each page of your site, you should be able to shave several seconds off of the load time.