Digital Performance Engineering (DPE) is the practice of ensuring that a website or application performs optimally in terms of speed, scalability, and reliability. It involves identifying and analyzing performance issues, implementing solutions, and continuously monitoring and improving performance over time.

Why is digital performance engineering important?

Digital performance engineering is crucial for ensuring that your website or application meets user expectations, performs well under high traffic conditions, and delivers a positive user experience. Without proper performance improvement measures, resultant overloads and downtime can prove costly. In October 2021, a Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp outage impacted millions of users globally, which caused market value dip about 5.4% and resulted in a loss of around $100 million.

‘According to a report by Salesforce, 57% prefer moving to a new seller for a better purchase experience offered by a competitor, while 40% look for alternatives owing to a poor mobile experience.’

According to Gartner, ‘Downtimes could cost up to average $300,000 per hour to resolve, and a one-second page delay, according to Akamai, for an ecommerce site that makes $100,000 per day, could cost up to $2.5 million in lost sales per year.

Here are some of the main reasons why performance engineering matters so much:

User experience

Users expect websites and applications to load quickly and respond smoothly. If your site is slow, unresponsive, or crashes frequently, users are likely to abandon it and switch to a competitor.

Reliability

By identifying and addressing performance issues and ensuring that the system can handle expected loads and usage scenarios without failing, performance engineering plays a crucial role in improving the reliability of software systems.

Revenue

Slow performance can also impact your revenue. According to Google, an extra second of page load time can result in a 20% drop in ad revenue.

Brand reputation

Poor website or application performance can damage your brand reputation and credibility, leading to negative reviews, decreased customer loyalty, and reduced trust.

Search engine rankings

Google uses page load speed as a ranking factor for search results. Slow-loading sites may not rank as well, leading to lower traffic and reduced visibility.

There are five key drivers acting as the catalyst for performance engineering and its business-critical status:

1. Cloud computing

  • Cost validation – performance evaluation to validate the maximum benchmark cost for the hosting solution
  • Reliability validation – evaluation of auto-scaling and disaster recover (DR) plans

2. Seasonal, large-revenue and disaster-recovery events prep

  • Product campaign event or seasonal sale
  • Rapid development of digital infrastructure and digital money transfer options
  • Reliability expectations – uptime
  • Focus on customer experience
  • Unpredictability of natural and manmade disasters

3. Omnichannel solutions

  • Seamless customer experience of applications on different platforms
  • Availability and reliability aspects of the application on all platforms
  • Custom messages based on the segmentation of audience

4. Shift in development lifecycle methodologies

  • Separate Development and Operations to DevOps
  • Waterfall to Agile

5. Opensource adoption

  • Cost savings – license and maintenance
  • Rapid maturity in open-source tools capabilities
  • Adhoc to minimal demand for performance testing
  • Performance testing is becoming an integral part of the development process

How to improve digital performance and load engineering?

Improving digital performance and load engineering requires a multi-faceted approach. Here are some tips to get started:

  • Conduct load testing – Conduct load testing to simulate user traffic and identify performance bottlenecks, capacity limits, and potential failure points. Use tools like Apache JMeter, LoadRunner, or Gatling for load testing.
  • Optimize page load speed – Optimize your website or application’s code, images, and other assets to reduce page load time. Use a content delivery network (CDN) to cache and deliver content faster.
  • Implement scalability solutions – Implement scalability solutions like auto-scaling and load balancing to handle sudden spikes in traffic.
  • Continuously monitor and improve – Continuously monitor and improve your website or application’s performance over time. Use performance monitoring tools and load testing to identify issues and implement solutions. Tools like Google Analytics, GTmetrix, and Pingdom to track and analyze website or application performance metrics like page load time, server response time, and error rates.

Performance Engineering services

In conclusion, digital performance and load engineering are critical for ensuring that your website or application delivers a positive user experience, generates revenue, and maintains a strong brand reputation. By using the right tools and techniques, you can optimize your digital performance and load engineering, and stay ahead of the competition.

Qualitest has already helped some of the world’s leading brands to maximize the performance of their digital assets. We can also help your business establish a systemic program of performance and load testing to keep your digital assets performing exactly as intended or better. Our Performance Assurance services include expert Reliability Engineering, Production Readiness testing, bespoke Performance Testing and Performance Consulting.