Ever wondered how much traffic your blog can handle without crashing. Well, there is a tool by which you can check how many visitors your blog can handle per minute or second.
The tool which we will be using is called loader.io that will help us test our site’s performance by sending virtual traffic to our website per second or per minute and giving us back the performance report of our site.
This tool is very easy to set up and use and we can easily set up a load test for our website in minutes.
Why you must do a load test of your website before going live –
A website load test is something you must do before launching your website or e-commerce store.
Why you might ask? Because by doing a website load test we will be able to see how much traffic our website can handle concurrently without crashing or having a crazy high load time during a traffic surge.
If your website gets crashed during a traffic surge then you can lose a lot of money because your site won’t load or will have a very high loading time which will send customers away from your site.
That’s why it’s best to load test your website using this online tool before launching it. So, that you can prepare for a traffic surge in your website to avoid it getting crashed.
Website load test online using Loader.io –
To do a website load test online we will use this online Application load testing Tool called Loader.io.
1. First go to the site and here you will need to make a new account. Click on “Sign Up Now” and then select the Plan you need. Click on Sign Up Now again below the plan you want to use.
2. Now here you will need to give your company name or any name you want and after that add your email and a secure password. And after that click on “Sign Up”.
3. After that you will need to verify your email. Go to your email app and there you will receive an email from Loader.io. Click on the “Verify me” link to verify your email.
4. Your account will be verified after going to the link. After that, you can log in to your Loader.io account using the email and the password that you provided.
5. After logging in to your Loader.io account you will get an option to add a “New Host”. You can add your website by clicking on the “New Host” button.
6. Now here you will need to add your domain name. Add your domain name and then click on the “Verify” button to continue.
7. To verify that you own that website you will have to copy the verification token that they give you and then add it to your website.
8. Copy the verification code and open a new notepad file. Paste the verification code in the txt file and then save the file with the name as the verification code. Like “loaderio-753f78a8b2f4d1051db444f419f24e29.txt”.
9. Now using FTP or File Manager in WordPress upload the txt file to your website’s root directory.
10. After uploading the verification code to your website go back to Loader.io and click on the “Verify” button. If you uploaded your verification code correctly then it will show “Congrats, target verification passed!” after clicking the verify button.
Click on “New Test” to create a new test.
11. Here in the “Test Name” give it anything you want. And in “Test type” you can select 3 methods – Clients per test, Clients per second, Maintain client load. Select the one you want.
In clients, select the number of clients you want to visit your website during the given time. In Duration select the time you want for this test to run.
12. After setting these up, scroll down to the bottom and then click on “Run Test”.
13. After you click on “run test” the test will start and loader.io will send the number of visitors you added in settings to your website over the period of time you gave.
Now here you will be able to see all the things you need to see how well your site is performing. Most important is the “Response time” because a high response time means your site is not able to handle that load properly.
If you see a spike in the response time in the graph below. Then it means that your server is having a hard time processing the requests. Also in Response Counts, if you see any timeout then it means that the server failed to process a request.
You can test out different settings in Loader.io to see how your website performs during a traffic surge which will help you prepare for a traffic surge in the future.
And that is how you can do a website load test online using Loader.io in a few easy steps.
Frequently asked questions –
Does doing a website load test can break my site?
No, doing a website load test won’t break your website. But what it can do is crash your website’s server for a few minutes meaning that you won’t be able to access your website for a few minutes.
This will get fixed automatically after you stop the load testing. And after that, you will be able to access your website without any problem.
Does my web hosting provider allow load testing?
Now load testing a website is something that not all hosting providers allow you to do. Because if you are using any shared hosting then you can cause problems for other users on the same server as you will use up all the resources of that server.
That’s why it’s important to contact your hosting provider before doing a website load test otherwise your web hosting account might get banned for abuse.
One more thing you should know is that doing a website load test uses a lot of resources from a server which means that if you are hosting your website on a limited resources hosting plan then you might have to pay some extra money to keep your site running.
Because otherwise, they will just lower the resources provided to your website and make it go down.
This is not a problem in VPS hosting as you get a server with dedicated resources and not shared resources.
How to make my website handle more load without crashing?
If you want your website to be able to handle more load then what you can do is enable caching. You will have to enable caching on your website and serve your content through a cdn.
You will also have to offload your images and website files to external cdn providers to make your website fast and make it handle more users without any problem.
You can check out this full tutorial on how we can handle million of visitors on shared hosting easily- Handle million visitors on shared hosting.
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