8 things you should know about Client-Side Performance Testing

Performance Testing is crucial to the development of the mobile application. It helps to test the speed, response time, stability, and resource usage of the app under a particular workload. Planning an effective performance test strategy is complex as the tester needs to cover specialized test types that should be applied in specific ways.

There are different performance testing types, namely, load testing, spike testing, stress testing, endurance testing, volume testing, and scalability testing. Client-side Performance Testing metrics demand the QA to behave like the users to identify the application’s bottlenecks. If an application takes longer to load, and the interface is not intuitive, customers will likely abandon it after first use. 80-90% of applications fail to make an impact on the users.

Client-side performance testing involves strategies that will help you to make the end-users of your app stay. It will enable you to develop an app that can deliver a strong customer experience (CX). Such performance testing helps to configure and optimize the application server and is the key to improved CX.

Here are 8 things that you should know about Client-side performance testing.

Perform And Behave Like Users

To carry client-side performance testing, the tester needs to perform and behave like the end-users to test if the application performs as expected in the real-world scenario. Duress testing is essential to try if the app can deliver consistent performance under a particular workload. Often when the traffic on an application increases, it takes longer to load. The response time of the server is an essential factor, if it takes longer to load, customers, are likely to refrain from using it.

Client-Side– Front-End Performance Testing Challenges

As mentioned above, server overload is an essential factor that can hamper the browser app’s performance. Some of the other features you need to test are the comprehensibility of the visible texts, graphics, formatting, and layout (CSS), and functional elements such as the button, links, forms. You need to test the available elements’ responsiveness to user actions and how quickly it can carry out the user’s requests. Ensure that you are matching the real-world environment with actual content and new code. Also, you need to identify the essential elements on your page and find out their load time.

Client-Side Test Types

Client-side performance test types can be classified into three categories.

• Desktop tests: Client-side tests are performed on a desktop browser.
• Mobile tests: Client-side tests are performed on mobile devices.
• Limited resources test: Client-side tests are performed with limited resources of CPU, memory, network, localization, and more.

When Should You Execute Client-Side Performance Test?

Client-Side Performance Test is a part of non-functional testing. You can before or during the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) phase. In UAT methodology, the clients/end users test the product to validate the product against their expectations. However, it is advisable to perform a Client-Side Performance Test as soon as an application or even a single page is ready.

Scope Of Client-Side Performance Testing

Client-Side Performance Testing helps you to deliver high-quality apps. You need to define the scope of performing such a testing methodology. The scope may include:

• Client-side analysis of performance metrics.
• Finding bottlenecks.
• System optimization.
• Identifying risk related to client-side performance.

Client-Side Performance Priorities

• Basic text and layout: The page’s visible elements should load in minimal time, and the critical text elements should be placed in the correct location.
• Functional elements: The functional elements should be visible, responsive, and fully functional on the page instantly.
• Formatting and images: pages on which the graphics are not very important, CSS and graphics can load after the functional elements.

How To Enhance Client-Side Performance

Some of the most common client-side performance pitfalls are unused CSS, blocking of resources, and compression, and incorrect formatting of images. Server response time is one of the most critical factors. To counter these problems, you can perform server application logic optimization. You can also migrate to a faster database and upgrade server hardware to have more memory and CPU.

Test Environments And Results

Some of the primary metrics you need to consider are Speed Index and Time to Interactive. Time to interact is a metric that determines the page’s interactivity by the network and JS activity. Speed Index metric is the average time that the page requires to display its visible parts. Perform the test in these environments, and evaluate the test results to develop competitive web applications.

To Conclude:

Client-side testing helps to counter several performance issues of your application. It can help you to identify front-end performance bottlenecks significantly. This testing methodology is key to smooth customer experience or CX.