How to Test Whether Your Hosting Can Handle Your Online Store Before Running Ads

Marketing through advertising on your website will result in attracting more customers; however, there is one thing that should be avoided once the marketing campaign begins, and that is your website not being able to handle the increased traffic.

The webpages for your products may take too long to load, your clients may have trouble adding products to their shopping cart, or they may have difficulty going through with the purchase process at all. All this despite your advertisements targeting the right demographic.

Here’s the thing—what you want to do is test your hosting setup before you generate any traffic at all. Thousands of visitors aren’t needed to start the process. With the correct tests, you will be able to discover performance issues, determine how your online shop will perform with more people visiting, and solve any potential issues beforehand.

This is how you do it:

1. Test Website Performance under Increased Demand

If you are considering running a large-scale advertising campaign, then this is one of the most critical steps.

Load test sends simulation traffic against your application to find out how it behaves when the conditions become tougher. The type of software used will help you view the time taken for each request, the number of transactions performed, and performance in relation to user numbers.

Software such as k6 is really useful to conduct these performance tests in a controlled way.

Steps for a successful test

Step 1: Predict the level of traffic you can expect.

Consider the number of visitors that you will get from the advertisements and the concentration of such traffic. A test where you expect 500 visits within a day is quite different from one where you expect 100 visits within a few minutes. It won’t give you the precise science but will give you a good starting point nonetheless.

In addition to helping with picking a hosting service for Google or Facebook advertising, our guide provides insight into why it is important to plan for peak traffic, not average.

Step 2: Increase the test load step by step

Use a little amount of virtual traffic and increase the concurrent load step by step. Pay attention to your site’s reaction times and any server loading problems.

Do not attack your live store with a huge number of requests right away. It may bring your website down, drive away real visitors or even activate security measures from your hosting provider.

Step 3: Simulate shopping journeys

Repeatedly beating up your homepage is not going to tell you how well your store handles its core functionality.

As long as your testing tool allows it, test the real activities of your customers such as product browsing, searching, cart modification, and checkouts. Always use staging environment wherever possible!

Very important safety tip: Do not perform automated tests that result in making real purchases, charging cards, mass mailing, and any kind of meddling with your production data!

Step 4: Locate your breaking point

Determine when it is that response times increase, error rates go up, or the resources of your server reach their limit. You can also learn how you can check resource utilization in your website on cPanel.

This gives you an idea of where your current system falls apart. Remember that it won’t give you a definite number of people who can use your site, as real-life visitors behave differently from automated visitors during tests.

2. Test Your Checkout Process for Stress

Your store may seem super fast until a customer attempts to checkout.

Checkout is the stage when your website does a lot of things at once including database writes, inventory checking, taxes and shipping calculation, as well as calls to payment gateways. All these actions require a lot of computing power compared to a regular page viewing operation.

Try to test the complete checkout process in a staging environment if it is possible.  Make sure your customers have no problem:

• Adding items to their cart.
• Changing quantities or removing items from the cart.
• Provide all the information for billing and shipping.
• Input any promo code.
• Complete the test purchase.
• Receive the confirmation they should get.

Don’t forget to check how your website handles issues when your payment service becomes slower or experiences downtime. Remember that not all checkout problems have something to do with your server; sometimes payment gateways, external APIs, and other tools could be the culprit.

It is through the monitoring of these factors that you will find the bottleneck.

3. Determine the Available Hosting Resources First

Before conducting any performance testing, check first what your hosting plan can accommodate.

Most hosting providers provide certain resource allocations for things such as CPU, RAM, disk space, and processes. Also, there might be a limit on how many times you can connect to a database or use some other type of service.

These limitations are important since an online store not only displays web pages; it also manages searches for products, shopping cart additions, calculates shipping charges, manages customer sessions, and exchanges information with payment systems.

Go to your hosting control panel and check the following:

• CPU and Memory Usage: Be sure to watch out for any regular surges in resource usage or warnings about exceeding your limit on your current plan.
• Entry processes and concurrent requests: See how many people or requests you can have on your website at the same exact moment.
• Database limits: Ensure your strategy doesn’t impose any limitations on the number of database connections to be opened simultaneously.
• Storage and Disk Usage: Ensure that you have enough space left on the disk and that there aren’t any intensive read and write operations slowing down the server.
• Performance limitations: Find out from your host whether there are any performance limitations for your store when you have traffic bursts.

Don’t also take “unlimited bandwidth” to mean “unlimited power.” Your web store may be limited by CPU power, RAM capacity, database queries, and high load of users accessing it simultaneously.

If your website faces a bottleneck problem even at regular traffic levels, solve this issue first.

4. Review Caching and Database Performance

Caching could assist your online store to cope with a larger number of customers, yet it needs to be configured properly.

Caching could prove useful for public pages of products and categories. Still, shopping cart pages, customer profiles, and checkout pages have personalized content and cannot be cached.

It is very easy to do more harm than good if your cache configuration is not done properly as you may end up showing information meant for one client to another or messing up their shopping cart.

If possible, test both your cached and uncached request separately. Ensure that any new updates made to products are shown immediately and that your logged in clients view only their own information.

Scrutinize all the slow database queries, plugin operations, and repeated requests being sent to external websites.

In case your website is built using WordPress, you might find our post regarding WordPress database optimization useful, since it will show you the benefits of regular maintenance in action.

However, keep in mind that just the size of your database doesn’t determine the speed of your site. The efficiency of your database queries and the load it experiences play a much more important role than its actual size.

5. Assess the Current Efficiency of Your Store

A baseline is required in order to determine the efficiency of your website before additional traffic is acquired.

Test your homepage, product pages, categories, cart, and checkout pages because different pages perform different functions. Hence, testing the homepage only will not give you an accurate view of the performance of your entire website.

Check page performance and ways for optimization using Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

Focus on these Core Web Vitals:

These metrics hold good for the 75th percentile of real-user measurements, individually tested for mobile and desktop devices when there is enough data available.

Even though lab tests are excellent for conducting a quick diagnosis test, it is not yet the real data that can be gotten from real users visiting your website. You can test your web pages using Google PageSpeed Insights.

One thing that you should know is that just because you have a fast page does not necessarily mean that you can handle a traffic surge with your hosting. Page speed tests check the speed, whereas load tests check how the site will work with concurrent load.

6. Be Aware of When Your Hosting is Ad-ready

There’s no need to have hosting that can deal with any amount of traffic before you begin running campaigns; you just need hosting that can handle your load effectively and some more.

Before going live, make sure that:

• Your key pages load fine both on mobile and desktop.
• Payment and shipping are behaving as expected from your end.
• CPU and memory limitations aren’t being used up frequently.
• You have some form of monitoring in place for the duration of the campaign.

If you experience a huge drop in speed or errors when placing minimal stress on your site, then find out why first and not spend more money on ads to attract customers.

However, it may be due to caching problems, optimization of plug-ins, database issues, or need for a better host. It all depends on the area causing the performance problem and not necessarily a better paid service plan.

Conclusion

It is always advisable to test your hosting services prior to starting any advertising. It will allow you to determine any weak spots before affecting your clients.

Check your resource limits, measure page performance, run controlled load tests, and verify that checkout works under realistic conditions.

Any test cannot assure you that there would be no downtime for your site. However, performing such tests would help you have a better understanding of its capacity.

Plan to grow your online shop?

HarmonWeb can assist you in researching hosting environments that cater to your online shop’s existing traffic and future projections.

Opt for a hosting environment that allows browsing, efficient checkout processes, and an improved experience for users from your future advertising campaigns.