Have you ever experienced extremely slow performance while watching the new episode of your favorite web series? Or your banking app hangs on the payday? Or app crashes while playing a viral game? Why do you think this happens? When millions of people are trying to access the app all at the same time, the app is subjected to immense pressure and crashes when it is not unable to scale.
App performance testing is a critical parameter to keep a check on slow performance, frequent crashes, and other performance issues. More than half of the app uninstalls are due to poor performance, which makes it even more critical to fix the issue and retain users.
Fixing performance issues is extremely important to retain users, attract users, build brand reputation, and secure the company from any monetary losses. Hence, organizations are implementing an elaborate performance testing strategy to improve the apps’ performance. Let us understand performance testing in detail and why is it so significant.
Everything to know about performance testing
To define performance testing, ‘it is a non-functional parameter of the application that is critical to check the app’s speed, scalability, and responsiveness. A good performance is required to connect with the users and create a loyal customer base.
As organizations are introducing innovations to attract users, the user expectations are increasing eventually reducing their tolerance for any glitch. As they have a wide range of options, they are getting picky about their choices. Hence, to cater to the ever-changing customer preference, improving performance becomes unavoidable.
Performance testing for web and mobile apps
When testing an app, whether web or mobile, performance testing is considered to be one of the critical parameters. Companies are making huge investments to improve the app’s performance to offer a seamless user experience. Here are some of the performance testing features of web and mobile apps:
Web app performance testing: Web apps perform on browsers and should be checked on all browsers to evaluate the loading time, responsiveness, and refresh rate. It should be tested across browsers to ensure good performance.
Mobile app performance testing: Performance testing of mobile apps depend on the network connectivity whether 2G, 3G, 4G, or Wi-Fi. Further, the app’s performance also depends on the apps running in the background which may reduce its responsiveness. Performance for these factors should be tested across devices and operating systems to ensure its performance is unaffected when moving across devices.
Performance testing identifiers While testing an app for performance, here are some of the key performance testing identifiers one should consider:
- Response time
- Launch time
- Maximum load that can withstand a crash
- Maximum load that can withstand peak traffic
- Blank screen duration
- Video quality
- Error rate
- Refresh rate
- App scaling capacity
- Image loading time
- Video loading time
- Animation loading time
- App stability
The above-mentioned parameters determine the app’s performance. In addition, one should also test the app for scalability under extreme traffic.
Conclusion
Apps with good performance instantly connect with the audience, conversely, slow response time, frequent crashes, low loading time, and other performance-related will make users uninstall the app. Hence, to connect with the users, engage them, and offer a seamless experience, the app’s performance should be tested for any hitch. Performance testing can also prevent organizations from business risks.
As the world is slowly adapting to the app-centric culture, performance has been a critical parameter to be tested in addition to the other functional and non-functional testing parameters.