statistics

Stress tests are good for finding out how many people can be on your website at the same time. A good test plan for an e-tailing site includes scenarios that represent people browsing your product pages and searching for specific items. It should also have realistic traffic for buyers going through the shopping cart experience and purchasing products with a credit card.

I had a call yesterday from a customer that wanted to stress test his e-commerce site with about 100,000 concurrent users. He explained that their marketing department is expecting significant growth of their sales because of a combination of the economic outlook, increased advertising, and a cool new unique channel technology that is going into production.

Thanks to some data from Gallup, Experian, and Pew Research, Marketing Charts produced some great graphs that show how the U.S. economic financial growth indices are improving in the past year or so. Consumers are spending more online with e-tailing sites, perhaps because they are more confident that their financial situation is improving.

Online Spending is Healthy

In January, 58% of survey respondents said 2011 will be better than 2010, 20% said 2011 will be worse, and 21% said it will stay the same. As the mood has improved, so has online spending which hit a record of $43.4 billion in the fourth quarter of 2010. That’s up from $32.1 billion in
Q3 2010, and it is the fifth consecutive quarter of positive year-over-year growth and second quarter of double-digit growth rates in the past year. So, online spending is one of the most vigorous parts of our economy right now. Is your site ready for growth?

On February 4, 2004, an enviable fellow geek shared a strange new website with the rest of the world that would literally impact everyone’s class reunions forever. Today is the 7th birthday of Facebook.

Sites Can Grow Exponentially

The four founders were Harvard students and started the site from their dorm room. The idea was only for college students. It’s immediate popularity drove them to expand to Columbia, Yale, and Stanford – within 1 month!

It only took Facebook 10 months to reach 1 million active users!!

It is not hyperbole to say that this single web application not only change the life of college students, but eventually the world as a whole. Initially it was a way for young men to creep on hot girls and find other students for sharing class notes or previous tests has now evolved into a way for young men to creep on hot girls and pretend they didn’t see their grandmother’s posting of their baby pictures.

This little college website now is a huge marketing phenomenon with about one-half a BILLION people signed up and 50% of those are on the site daily. It has guaranteed that anyone who was living the single college carefree lifestyle in the past 5 years will always have a haunting fear that an incriminating picture will expose their sins later in life. I guess the future Bill Clintons won’t be running for president after all. Facebook has changed our lives in ways we can’t imagine. I wonder how many marriages will end from the distrust created by the stomach-turning photo of a spouse (from earlier days) found through a tag notice.

According to the Mozilla Blog of Metrics, they can drive an additional 60,000,000 Firefox downloads per year by making a few minor tweaks to their top landing pages.

WEB PERFORMANCE to the rescue! Higher performance translates to higher conversions and revenue.

Amazon states that for every 100ms of latency, they lose 1% of their sales. That’s an enormous amount of money for what most of us would call a tiny amount of performance. Guess it goes to show that web performance is more important than even us load testing geeks can imagine. So, don’t get too upset if your CEO doesn’t fully comprehend the fact that the company would be in a world of hurt without you.

Please take the opportunity to ask a friend to visit your web site. Then ask them how long they believe it took to pull up the home page. If your friend is like the average person, they will think your site was running more than one-third slower than it actually performed. According to Stoyan Stefanov, the architect of YSlow 2.0 and Smush.it, users have faulty perceptions of time, and when recalling how long a page loads, they will remember it took about 35% longer than it really did.

Tomorrow is a holiday here, and it puts me in a good mood. Thanksgiving forces me to take some quiet time to ponder how truly blessed I am. So today I’m in an appreciative frame of mind. It also makes me feel somewhat child-like because I remember the smell of huge Thanksgiving dinners with my grandfather’s family.

This atmosphere has put me in kid mode. That’s the only way I can explain why I found it so fun to get wrapped up in cool web statistics that I found at StatCounter.com. Am I the last geek on the planet to find this site? StatCounter, I’m grateful for you.

What at first caught my eye was the percentage of usage for each web browser. Knowing how many people are using Firefox vs. IE vs. Chrome has value to me since the browser affects performance of websites (user perspective). It’s also good to know IE 6 vs IE 7 vs IE 8. When Firefox came out about 6 years ago, I started using it primarily because it performed better. Now, Chrome and Firefox seem to be implementing the best new functionality and speed improvements, so I fire them up almost interchangeably – which is problematic for my bookmarks.

However, I was surprise to see the Mashable article declaring Microsoft Internet Explorer Loses Browser War. It seems to me IE still has the most share, but the drop from 99% to 49% over the past few years is noteworthy. Perhaps there are millions of nerds celebrating from a feeling of schadenfreude as they watch MS lose ground somewhere in the software industry. Come to think of it, I have a bit of thinly-veiled grudge residual from the hundreds of “blue screen moments from hell”.