Web Performance Testing Tools | The Ultimate Guide

Introduction to Web Performance Testing

Web Performance testing may be defined as a non-functional type of testing primarily used to assess or evaluate the performance and responsiveness of our web application under varying amounts of stress and load. This greatly helps the developers and the other team members gather the required information, which is necessary to eliminate various bottlenecks and loopholes.

Determine and identify any performance-related issues or bottlenecks in the application under test. Click to explore about, Performance Testing Tools

What are the various types of Web Performance Testing?

Load Testing
Stress Testing
Soak Testing
Spike Testing
Volume Testing

Why Performance Testing is important?

In today’s world, the performance of a web application matters a lot. Before diving into the selection of web performance tools, let's look at the importance and the value of performance.

The performance of an application is key to a good user experience. Performance Testing helps reduce downtime once the application is released to the public.
Even if your website has the best content and ideal Search Engine Optimization (SEO), a website with a slow load time will propel your website away from the visitors and exclude it from the Google results.
It is rightly said that the first impression is the last, and it rightly goes with the website. If your website loads too slow on the customer's first visit, he would never revisit your website.
A website’s performance has a direct impact on Google’s ranking. If a website has low performance, it will be ranked low by Google. Hence it is essential to maintain the performance of your website.

A risk management activity. Application risks generally transpose to much more significant business risks, be it financial or face value of the company. Click to explore about, Continuous Load Testing

What is the criteria for comparing Load Testing tools?

To choose a tool for any testing, it is very necessary to compare the chosen tool and the other existing tools in the market. So to do so, some criteria need to be defined based on which this comparison will be done. So following are some comparison criteria that can be considered for an effective comparison,

User Interface (UI): This criterion will determine whether our selected tool provides a clean and easy-to-use UI.

Features & Functionality: This feature will determine whether the features and functionalities provided by the tool are as per the requirements.

Realistic user simulation will verify whether our tool properly reflects real-life users and other load activities.
Scripting language –It will determine the number of scripting languages our tool supports.
Device testing variety will determine whether our selected tool supports both mobile and web applications.
Reporting and analytics – It determines whether our selected tool provides proper reporting features and can be exported in different formats.

Integrations: It will also determine whether our selected tool is capable of integrating with different pre-built integrations.

Pricing: It will also determine whether the application is capable enough according to its price.

a tool that enables end-users, administrators and organizations to gauge and evaluate the performance of a given system. Click to explore about, Performance Monitoring Tools

What are the best client-side Web Performance Testing Tools?

Some of the important metrics of Client-Side Performance testing are as follows:

Time to First Byte
Time to Start Render
DOM Content Ready End
Doc Complete Time

The newer applications are being developed using JavaScript frameworks like React and AngularJS. These applications spend more time on the browser than on the server-side.

The two tools that are considered the best for client-side performance testing are:

Google PageSpeed Insights

It is a service that examines the content of a web page and provides a set of suggestions that helps in making your pages load faster.
Reduction of page load times further reduces the bounce rates and increases the conversion rates.
It is an open-source performance testing tool.

Google Lighthouse

Google Lighthouse is yet another open-source tool that helps improve the quality of a web page.
The tool checks/tests the accessibility and SEO of our web page and a major focus on the Core Web Vitals.
In this tool, you need to give the specified URL, and it will provide you with a list of suggestions and improvements that you can implement to improve your web page’s accessibility, performance, best practices, and many more.
LightHouse is available in three different workflows: Chrome Developer Tools, Command line (Node), A Chrome extension.
Lighthouse is an open-source tool.
Lighthouse can integrate with various web performance as well as non-web performance services.

- Web Performance Service Integrations: Web Page Test,HTTP Archive, Calibre, DebugBear, Treo, Apdex and SpeedVitals.

- Non-Web Performance Service Integrations: PageWatch, SEO Gaurd, Fluxgaurd, AwesomeTechStack.

The process of testing an integrated system to verify that it meets specified requirements.span style="font-size: 14pt;"> Click to explore about, System Testing Tools and its Best Practices

What are the best server-side Web Performance Testing Tools?

The list of Web Performance Testing Tools to understand server-side performance are listed below:

Locust.io

As the name suggests, this tool's idea or motive is to hit your website with a swarm of locusts. This swarm of locusts represents a set of end-users.
The person using the tool is responsible for defining the behaviour of each locust, and the entire process of swarming is monitored using a real-time web UI.
Locust supports thousands of users on a single machine as it is an event-based tool.
Various special features provided by Locust are,

→ One can write test scenarios using Python.
→ Locust is scalable and distributed.
→ It has a web-based User Interface.
→ Using this tool, one can test any system.

Locust is an open-source load testing tool.

Apache Jmeter

Apache JMeter is a pure Java open-source software application designed to measure the application's performance using different performance testing techniques.

It provides the facility to test the performance on both static and dynamic resources.
It provides the facility to run tests on both GUI and the command line.
It helps in generating a complete HTML report.
It is an open-source performance testing tool.
Jmeter can easily integrate with Maven, Gradle, and Jenkins.

Element

It is a browser-based load testing tool that allows you to design scripts in Typescript.
It can interact with your web application the same way an end-user will do.
It is an open-source load testing tool.

Siege

Siege is a multi-platform application used to assess the following factors,

→ Data transferred
→ Response Time
→ Transaction Rate
→ Throughput
→ Concurrency rate

It can operate in three different modes,

→ Regression
→ Internet simulation
→ Brute force

This tool should only be made to run on the servers you own or have explicit permission.

Multi Mechanize

It is an open-source load testing framework used for performing performance and load testing.
It functions by running Python scripts simultaneously to produce a load against a remote site or service.
It is widely used for scalability and performance testing but can also produce a heavy load against any remote API accessible from Python.
The test output reports are saved as HTML or JMeter-compatible XML.

Monitoring of applications is the biggest aspect, As the speed and the accuracy expected is very high to address the issue on time. span style="font-size: 14pt;"> Click to explore about, Application Performance Management in DevOps

Conclusion

In today’s world, infusing performance testing plays a very important role in the success of organizations. But to ensure that our application is giving the best performance results and there are no bottlenecks, it is very necessary to choose a web performance testing tool that satisfies all the defined performance criteria. Our chosen tool should be capable of testing our application's scalability, robustness, and reliability.