Testing your web application for performance is vital to provide a better and consistent user experience as your application and users grow. Performance testing is done to check your web application’s speed, stability, and scalability under load (expected number of users). It is best practice to start testing your web application as early as possible in the software development lifecycle to eliminate performance bottlenecks and other defects before they go into production and impact your users.

While performance testing is mostly done in an automated way to increase accuracy and reliability, manual performance testing is also possible. It can improve the performance of your web application a lot. Since you are reading this, we will answer your burning question:  How to carry out performance testing manually?

Manual Performance Testing

Manual performance testing involves testing your web application without using any automated scripts and automation tools. You need to open the web application and go through every page, form, API, and user path, and record performance metrics to analyze the performance. Let’s go through step by step process to test the performance of a web application manually- 

Understand the Requirements

Since you are going to keep track of every performance aspect to provide a better user experience, you need to go through every little detail of your web application. This will include understanding load, user flow, dependencies, third-party integrations, goals & objectives, etc.

Prepare Test Scenarios

For every system components such as database connections, CPU utilization, third-party APIs, response time, load time, etc., you need to create well-thought test scenarios to analyze the performance individually and collectively with the expected load. Apart from that, you need to create test cases for critical user paths, web pages, forms, etc., to broaden your test coverage.

Execution

Once you understand the web application and test scenarios, you need to browse the website and check the performance manually. Following are some tips to utilize while doing it – 

• Keep a stopwatch to record the response and load time for web pages and APIs.
• Use different browsers (Chrome, Firefox, etc.) to analyze the performance.
• Use different devices (Laptop, Mobile, Tablets, etc.) with different specifications and vendors to see how your web application performs.
• Use VPN to simulate users from different geographical locations to check the performance for users coming from different regions.

Reporting

Compile every information and data that you have used during your testing carefully with results. This can be a daunting task, but it is important to analyze and optimize your website after the testing and further testing iterations.

Regression Testing

After you have completed your performance testing, you need to re-verify everything to minimize human error and make sure that what you have observed is an actual case. Without regression testing, you can end up wasting your time on problems that don’t exist.

Drawbacks of Manual Performance Testing

Manual performance testing is easy to start but tough to keep up due to numerous disadvantages and issues associated with it. Let’s take a look at those.

1. You will need to invest upfront in the hardware and software required to set up the test environment.
2. Manual testing consumes lots of human resources, which otherwise can do meaningful tasks to improve web applications.
3. Manual performance testing is time consuming compared to automation testing, where you can execute a variety of test cases quickly and easily.
4. Manual performance testing is prone to human error that makes it difficult to achieve accurate results, and you have to perform regression testing to re-verify everything.
5. Generating a high load is difficult with manual testing, and it will become a problem when your user base grows.
6. Manual performance testing can’t capture detailed performance metrics resulting in many performance bottlenecks slips into production.

LoadView: Fully Managed Performance Testing

LoadView is a cloud-based fully-managed load testing tool for web applications with no learning curve. You can easily simulate thousands of users for your web application and see how it performs under the load. From load time to underlying system performance, you can analyze everything to easily identify performance bottlenecks and eliminate them before they impact your users and affect your business revenues. Following are some of the best features that LoadView offers to test the performance of a web application – 

• Multiple Browsers & Devices – LoadView supports more than 40 different browsers and devices to provide better coverage of your test cases and end-users.

• Multiple Geo-locations – With LoadView, you can simulate your load from different geo-locations to create the most realistic test environment and improve the web application’s performance on a regional level.

• EveryStep Web Recorder – Even if you don’t have any programming background, you can use LoadView’s point-and-click scripting feature to capture complex user paths such as button clicks, mouse navigation, keypresses, etc., and execute your load tests.

• Real-time Load Adjustment – You can tweak your load in real-time to dive deep into load testing and uncover issues that can otherwise go undetected. You can do the capacity planning for your web application infrastructure by performing exploratory load testing.

• Reporting – LoadView generates detailed and insightful test reports to analyze the performance in detail and make informed decisions to rectify issues and eliminate performance bottlenecks. 

Conclusion: How to Manually Test the Performance of a Web Application

Performance testing, especially load testing, is vital to ensure your web application is stable, reliable, and scalable. Performance testing helps you uncover performance bottlenecks in your web application and minimize the downtime risk during peak traffic. Manual performance testing will need significant team resources, time, and set up to execute your test cases. However, it has many drawbacks and is not scalable. 
LoadView is a fully-managed load testing tool that you can use to test your web applications, web pages, REST APIs, third-party APIs, streaming media, e-commerce websites, etc. Getting started with LoadView is pretty easy. Just sign up and start testing your web application within minutes. There is no learning curve involved.  You can perform load testing without any programming knowledge.