Do you want to find out how to put your blog to the test of traffic?
One thing we don't tell you when you start a blog or a business website is that one day your website will reach its limit.
Hosting companies have no interest in letting you know about this, and plugin and theme developers just want to make more sales. So it's hard to tell whether or not a plugin will conflict with your site when traffic starts to increase.
WordPress is a pretty good solution for your blog, especially when you go for a quality hosting service. However, testing your website before it goes live is not a realistic way to understand how your site will perform.
What happens when the traffic peaks during the holidays? Is your site ready for this type of stress?
What do we mean by stress?
Resistance tests (or load tests) occur when you put a certain amount of stress on a software or technology system to test its resistance.
This stress test is done in several environments. For example, you'll want to see how your website behaves with a huge load of traffic. At the same time, it's a good idea to compare this peak to the ones you will get when traffic is low.
Overall, stress testing means simulating the arrival of multiple users on your blog at one time. This way, you are ready for your success as a site owner. One thing to keep in mind is that you don't have to throw everything on your site at once. Seeing if your site will resist traffic like Facebook is completely useless.
Why?
Because your new website or blog is unlikely to receive the same traffic as Facebook. So you need to assess your own numbers and understand your average visits per day and month. Then you can take the most traffic you've received in a period of time and use that as a benchmark.
However, the stress test point is often to anticipate unprecedented traffic. Because of this, we recommend that you be too generous with your maximum number of visits.
Evaluation of your current performance
We recommend that you use one of the following tools to evaluate the current performance of your website:
Each of the sites listed above provide good tools for testing your site's performance. They also offer solutions that you may or may not be able to fix yourself. For example, a problem of cached can be solved by a plugin of cached, the combination of CSS and external JavaScript may require additional knowledge.
You will also get insight into how quickly your pages load without a lot of traffic. This can give you a good place to start when you move on to performance testing with heavy traffic.
Eliminate unnecessary plugins
UsageDD allows administrators to monitor the resource usage of their WordPress installation. It will add a small box at the bottom center of each page, visible only to admins, that shows the number of MySQL queries, the amount of memory used by the code on the page, and whether you are using a compatible web server (most are compatible), the "time to first byte" (TTFB) and the time required to generate the complete page. TTFB is used by Google for page ranking purposes, and this will be the first of the two displayed.
You can use the display to determine if your website has too many plugins loaded, if your theme is too "heavy", or if something is wrong on your server. The plugin itself uses virtually no resources and should be compatible with all themes and plugins that generate HTML.
So install this WordPress Plugin will remove the WordPress plugins that can affect the speed and performance of your website. For example, you might find that one of the plugin conflicts is causing your site to perform poorly.
Overload test: How to do it and with what tools?
You have two ways of doing these tests. The first is to walk around manually, with a DIY procedure. The other is to choose a commercial product to make the test work for you.
The manual process
Beginners should avoid this method. However, if you consider yourself to be experienced then there is no problem.
From our perspective, you can technically go with anything. However, we have a few favorites:
- JMeter - Here is an open-source Java application, with powerful tools to test performance. JMeter supports testing for most applications, for backend servers and for protocol types, it is a fairly popular solution and you will find good documentation on the latter.
- Siege - The latter is about ten times easier to learn than JMeter or Tsung. It is undoubtedly the best bet for less experienced developers who want to do DIY, to do overload tests with a simulation of users, and it can eventually put the server in a state of siege.
Business Options
For many people the manual method is not very comfortable. If you are a less experienced developer, or if you do not want to waste time, I recommend the use of commercial tools.
Keep in mind that some of these options are expensive so the DIY the better will be, you will determine it based on your budget.
Load Impact is a platform that offers affordable prices and a user-friendly interface. You can test on regular WordPress sites to get a feel for what people are actually going to be doing on your site.
Although " Load Impact Has a few cloud tools, it was originally created to work through the cloud to test the performance of websites and applications. The starting price is at 29,99$ per month, and its main services include load testing and server performance.
That's all for this tutorial, I hope you can properly perform performance tests on your blog.
