Businesses rely on their websites and networks to support their operations. Therefore, it is essential to test and determine how much load your website can handle in particular situations. Managing website load is vital to preempting interruptions that may occur if your site experiences a sudden spike in traffic.
The challenge in determining your website load capacity is figuring out how well your web server can manage the traffic. You need to estimate the number of concurrent users so that you can keep the services running before your site starts to struggle under the burden.
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How to Determine Your Website’s Traffic Capacity
Measuring simultaneous users is the fundamental way to assess how much your website can handle. The term “concurrent users” refers to the number of visitors who simultaneously access a website to perform different transactions. To assess a website’s capacity, you must consider the peak concurrent users for a particular time. Here we walk you through two ways to determine your website load capacity using Google Analytics.
Real-Time Reports
To eliminate any guesswork in assessing web load capacity, Google Analytics has a real-time reporting tool you can use. To access real-time reports once you log in to your Analytics account:
- Click View.
- Under Standard reports, click Real-Time reports.
- Click on the Overview tab to access the live reporting.
Real-time reports allow you to see the “heartbeat” of your website.
The first row of charts presents valuable data to calibrate your load test against real-world data as follows:
- Active Visitors: Active users include those visitors who are currently doing something on the site. They could be reading your blog, clicking on items that generate tracking events, or just navigating. The data encompasses 30-minute sessions. At peak times, the data can give you an idea of your highest number of concurrent visitors.
- Page Views Per Minute: This chart gives you an aggregate of the speed at which your users navigate between pages on the site. This data is necessary for determining your user’s access patterns.
- Page Views Per Second: This is the actual heartbeat of your website. You can use this data to estimate your load capacity. The trends you see can assist you in ascertaining how many requests per second your site can support.
Analytics Load Test
Another way of determining your website’s traffic is by running a load test on Google Analytics. The test results can be meaningful in scaling during peak hours to prevent any problems resulting from a spike.
Log in to your Analytics account and check how many peak sessions you experience over any period. Then perform a test that generates a similar number of users. You can use a higher number to ensure that the site can handle more visitors than the recent peak. A simple formula for such a calculation would be:
Concurrent Users = ‘Hourly Sessions × Average Session Duration
Conclusion
Significant traffic is every website owner’s dream, and it is easy to achieve. With the right tools like a free website traffic generator, you are sure to generate a lot of qualified web traffic. Assessing how much traffic your website can handle ensures that a spike in users does not exceed your site’s capacity.
