Ensuring optimum API performance during the holiday season is imperative. Last holiday season, CNBC online spending reached $143.7 billion, a healthy 14.1% up from the previous year’s sales. Also, by Adobe Analytics Cyber Monday sales hit $9.4 billion, up nearly 19% from the previous year.
The holiday season means heavy app traffic, the more reason why you should put up an API performance strategy in place before the holiday. You and your team need to make sure your website, and/or mobile app is well-equipped for the heavy traffic that comes with the holiday season.
Why Should I Care about Load Testing Right Now?
For starters, how did you fair during last year’s holiday season? The holidays are just around the corner, and many other professionals are feverishly running performance analysis based on previous year’s metrics and this year’s goals.
The goal for everyone’s the same – to not lose revenue. We all know that customer experience affects revenue streams. How do customers respond to a slow experience?
A study by Microsoft says, the attention span of an average human reduced from 12 seconds in 2012 to a mere 8 seconds in 2015. In other words, if your customers can’t see your complete webpage or do what they want to on your web or mobile app within 8 seconds, you could lose them forever.
What Does API Performance Have to Do With My Consumers?
Every web or mobile app involves data movement. And getting data to customers means going through a few APIs. Generally, testing API performance can help you:
- Ensure that your systems are ready for the heavy traffic
- Be equipped to scale resources already identified as troublesome.
- Eliminate common mistakes around e-commerce performance disasters
So What Do You Propose That I Do About It?
To set up a viable performance strategy, here are some of the best practices:
- Figure out the most important user behaviors and workflows that contribute the most of your holiday revenue. Proactively coordinate with other business units (like Sales and Marketing) on holiday promos. For example, you can significantly improve personalization of digital marketing efforts by tailoring your messaging to the holidays of each specific user by implementing very simple to use Public Holidays API
- Ensure visibility to existing system performance through both front-end and API monitoring by collaborating with all IT groups (developers, testers, operations) on concerns and historical issues. Be proactive: run assessments, pre-production load tests based on anticipated traffic goals.
- Determine your baseline on a 1x traffic multiplier, and estimate problematic peak multiples. Know what it will cost to scale considering known resource issues (CPU, network, memory, disk)
- Brief your team and all stakeholders on your findings and your holiday performance strategy
You can successfully see out the holiday rush by getting the right combination of people and tools involved. API performance impacts everyone, from your consumers, partners, to your technical teams.
Conclusion
Having the right APIs is not enough; you need to ensure optimum API performance. Last-minute, late-night performance scaling, and testing doesn’t always end well. Combining Load testing and functional testing will fully prepare you for the holiday season. Load testing will give you a knowledge of your API capabilities, and regular performance checks will help keep your backlog clean.