1. Sleep Better Knowing Your Site Will
Deliver on Your Biggest Day Ever
Dave Karow & Howard Chorney

2. Agenda
• What online and mobile shoppers want
• Shift to mobile: impact on shared infrastructure
• Five best practices for readiness testing

3. Online customers want performance

4. Permanent abandonment rate
Outage Slow performance
9% 28%
Source: Akamai

5. Source: http://www.soasta.com/blog/web-performance-mothers-day/
Fast: they buy more.
Slow: they buy less.

6. Performance affects every business KPI
• Revenue
• Conversions
• User satisfaction
• User retention
• Time on site
• Page views
• Bounce rate
• Organic search traffic
• Brand perception

7. Now you know why we say,
Performance is Everything

8. So?
Longer round-trip times
More open connections
10% shift  100% more resources used
In 2015 55% of your traffic is mobile*
* Comscore, Internet Retailer, IBM…

9. Mobile demands more of your shared
infrastructure per-user than desktop.
Another reason to test
with real user patterns.
Which leads us to our first tip…

10. Home Page
Browse Products
View Product Detail
Put Item in Cart
Shipping
Charges
Buy
Readiness Tip #1
Know your users:
Workload Modeling, including Funneling

11. Browse
100 users
Add to Cart
100 users
Check out
100 users
This NEVER happens…

12. Use REAL user behavior, not guesses…
Image sources (clockwise): SOASTA, kissmetrics.com, adobe.com

13. Readiness Tip #2
Test end-to-end
with full site functionality
in production
Yes, really.

14. Production Testing:
Goal: see where it strains, but never knock it over.
Must have: Orchestrator with a pulse on it all.
Homework: Learn about “test mode” from
your credit card gateway provider.

15. Readiness Tip #3
Pull out cables and plugs.
See what happens.
Prove you have no single point of failure (SPOF)
between the outside world and your systems:
ISPs, Routers, Firewalls, Load Balancers

16. What if
losing one
router takes
you entirely
off line?
Photo credit: newsroom.united.com

17. Readiness Tip #4
Don’t just use a CDN, but test it and warm it up.

18. Why “test” your CDN
You need to KNOW how well your CDN is protecting
user experience and relieving backend stress.
(A plan is good, proof is better)

19. Why “warm up” your CDN?
Make sure the items are on the shelves before
customers show up to browse.
Run external tests
with full geographic diversity
and at reduced scale

20. Warm up your cache too…
If you use caching, sending virtual users along to
force common assets into cache will make the real-
users visits more crisp.
At the beginning of tests, performance is sub-par and
then it improves. Let virtual users experience that,
not your customers.

21. Readiness Tip #5
Involve everybody
Readiness testing is a team sport

22. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Debbie McCallum
ops, apps, network, CDN, 3rd
party providers.

23. SOASTA Can Help in Time for the Holidays.
www.soasta.com/holiday-readiness