CTO at BRKFST
Jon Lopinot
Performance testing for websites ensures your web application handles real traffic without slowdowns, crashes, or revenue loss. QA Madness is a leading software performance testing company trusted by tech teams globally. We deliver load testing, stress testing, and full-cycle performance QA services that ensure your application handles real-world traffic - every time.
Get a consultationOur specialists become full-fledged members of the clients’ teams soon after they join the projects. Each QA expert is as dedicated to your goals as you are. Our average retention on the QA software testing project is 3.5 years. Many clients have been working with our dedicated QA experts far more than that, and many choose to return with their new projects.
Performance testing in software is the practice of evaluating how an application performs under expected and extreme conditions. It answers the critical question: will your software hold up when it matters most? At QA Madness, we run comprehensive performance testing cycles – from baseline checks to full stress scenarios – so your team ships with confidence.
What’s the purpose of software performance testing? It gives confidence that your product will be ready for various traffic scenarios. There is a list of activities that can fall under this category. You may have heard of mobile performance testing, web page performance testing, system performance testing, browser load testing, API load testing, UI load testing, and more. The thing is, every product requires performance testing at some stage. Intense traffic that follows a marketing campaign, a holiday season, and other triggers can reveal vulnerabilities when it is too late. Our QA specialists analyze how your software behaves with different user loads, data volumes, and transaction rates, examining every performance aspect down to the millisecond. With this data, you can optimize and enhance your product to drive better business results.
Performance testing as a service can come in many forms. There are several parts of performance testing and QA that are relevant for a specific product or different stages of its lifecycle that help guarantee comprehensive coverage and results. Our service suite includes customized testing solutions that address your specific performance concerns, whether you’re launching a new product, scaling an existing application, or optimizing critical systems.
Understanding different types of performance testing is crucial for building a stable and resilient product. We’re far beyond the times when load testing of a website would be enough to fully secure the technical and business performance. Nowadays, various types of software performance testing serve distinct purposes, from measuring responsiveness under normal conditions to identifying breaking points under extreme loads. Our experts prepare testing strategies to match your needs, applying the right combination of performance testing types.
Before software goes live, it is essential to verify its ability to handle an anticipated number of users. Software load testing helps the team learn how a product will behave under average real-world conditions.
A system behaves differently under pressure when traffic surpasses the expected. Performance stress testing implies running a website at 100% of a baseline load and higher, allowing us to identify the breaking points.
One more software performance is a sudden increase in traffic. The QA team runs spike tests to check software's reaction to large user bursts—short and sudden, with at least twice higher traffic, and if it can adapt to the demand.
Endurance tests allow determining how long software can work under high traffic conditions without losing its productivity. The data gathered with this type of performance software testing helps to prevent downtime.
It is crucial for a system to scale up correctly. With this software performance test, we check if nodes connect on time and if servers can maintain a high loading speed as the number of simultaneous users increases.
This performance testing type identifies potential issues with data retrieval, storage mechanisms, and query performance when your databases grow, preventing slowdowns as your data accumulates.
Software testing—and performance testing, in particular—delivers tangible business value that extends far beyond technical metrics. Testing performance is the way to identify specific bottlenecks and improve your software before users experience problems with the live product. Every software test for performance directly contributes to improved user satisfaction, operational efficiency, and market competitiveness. These are some of the many advantages your team can experience first-hand. For websites specifically, performance testing delivers measurable business outcomes: faster page loads reduce bounce rates by up to 40%, stable performance during traffic spikes prevents direct revenue loss, and consistent speed builds user trust that translates into higher conversion rates. (новий абзац)
QA Madness helps tech companies strengthen their in-house teams by staffing dedicated manual and automated testing experts.
Want your software to perform flawlessly under pressure? Our performance test services can make it happen. Our team knows which metrics matter most, how to identify hidden bottlenecks, and what real users expect from high-performing applications. It’s all considered during our meticulous performance testing flow. Breaking down this work into manageable pieces, it entails five core stages.
Studying your software and setting the background for work.
QA engineers prepare the foundation for software testing for performance. We analyze your product’s technical architecture, expected user loads, performance requirements, business goals, and overall expectations to identify which aspects matter most. The team maps expected traffic patterns, peak usage periods, and performance thresholds that align with your business objectives.
We also determine the KPIs to measure, such as response time, throughput, resource utilization, and concurrent user capacity. The team assesses and communicates performance risks and their potential business impact. This phase concludes with clear testing priorities, workflows, benchmarks, and roles summarized in the performance testing strategy document.
Developing the strategy and preparing the testing setup.
The team creates comprehensive test scenarios that simulate real-world usage patterns across different load conditions. QA engineers develop detailed test scripts, including all relevant types of performance tests, that focus on business-critical transactions and potential performance bottlenecks. This documentation keeps the testing process structured and accounts for all essential performance variables.
The team also collaborates with developers and system administrators to set up the performance testing environment and prepare test data. This preparation includes configuring monitoring tools, creating appropriate test data sets, setting up load generators, and establishing baseline metrics. The technical setup is carefully calibrated to produce accurate, reliable performance measurements.
Executing the tests to measure the performance of your software.
The team systematically runs performance, load, and stress testing, as well as other checks, following the established scenarios and gradually increasing virtual user loads. The specialists monitor and record key metrics throughout the process, documenting how your application responds to various conditions. They identify performance bottlenecks, memory leaks, database inefficiencies, and other issues that affect scalability.
QA performance testing procedures can cover both individual components, system performance tests, and end-to-end workflows, depending on your objectives and timelines. All issues are documented with detailed metrics, environmental conditions, and load levels at which problems occur. Our engineers analyze not just the symptoms but dig deep to identify root causes.
Retesting the fixes and core functionality after initial enhancements.
After initial performance, stress, load, and other types of testing, the product team works on optimizing your software to meet performance requirements. After developers fix the problems, QA engineers verify these enhancements. They re-run the tests to measure the impact and perform regression testing to ensure that performance fixes don’t introduce functional issues or new problems.
You receive detailed performance reports on each type of performance testing—across all tested scenarios and load conditions. We create comprehensive documentation showing performance metrics for each critical transaction and system component. The team provides clear and detailed feedback highlighting the issues, improvements, and areas to monitor in production.
Overviewing the deployment and behavior in the live environment.
When testing application performance is over, QA engineers can overview the deployment and run quick checks in production after the new software build becomes available for regular users. They also work with user tickets and other members of the product team to monitor and analyze feedback on performance.
You also receive specific recommendations for performance optimization, prioritized by user impact and implementation complexity, that will be useful for your future growth. The team can also help establish ongoing performance monitoring strategies and provide consultation on infrastructure scaling to accommodate increased demand as your user base grows.
When comparing performance testing services providers, the key differentiators are team seniority, tooling depth, and industry coverage. QA Madness covers all three: 100% senior/middle engineers, hands-on experience with JMeter, Gatling, k6, Locust, and projects across e-commerce, SaaS, healthcare, and fintech. Different industries face different performance risks - but the consequences are the same: lost revenue, damaged reputation, and frustrated users. E-commerce companies run performance testing before Black Friday and holiday sales to ensure their platforms handle traffic spikes without checkout failures. SaaS companies test during rapid growth phases to confirm their infrastructure scales without degrading response times for existing users. Fintech companies stress-test transaction processing to prevent failures during peak billing or payment periods. QA Madness has run performance testing for companies in all these scenarios.
The majority of our QA experts are professionals of Middle and Senior level, with experience in several business domains and various technologies, with QA Leads and ISTQB-certified engineers among them.
QA Madness has over a decade of experience in software QA. It includes collaboration with startups and enterprises alike for implementing software projects of different complexity and in a vast range of industries.
We are an ISO-certified company with proven credibility, compliance, and efficiency. We value the clients’ trust and grant full reliability—with all data kept confidential and corresponding protocols respected.
We work with short-term and ongoing software projects. You can choose the cooperation model and QA talent that suit your needs at the time and change it later as the project grows, easily scaling the team and process.
We guarantee rapid feedback and full transparency at all stages of communication. QA engineers participate in all meetings you want to involve them in, as well as share detailed, actionable feedback on quality.
Our team takes a proactive approach to all tasks and projects. There won’t be mere bug reporting but helpful recommendations regarding overall quality improvements for the software, documentation, and QA process.
Our clients often have questions about performance testing and how it fits into their development cycle. Below, we’ve answered the most common questions to help you understand what is performance testing in software and how it works. For more details on our approach and the value of comprehensive performance testing for your applications specifically, contact our team. We’ll be glad to talk.
When selecting a performance testing company, look for: proven experience with your tech stack, a team of senior QA engineers (not juniors), transparent reporting, and flexibility in engagement model. QA Madness checks all these boxes – with 10+ years of QA expertise, ISTQB-certified engineers, and a track record across 100+ projects in diverse industries.
Performance testing in software is a type of QA that evaluates how an application behaves under various load conditions – measuring speed, stability, scalability, and resource usage. It includes load testing, stress testing, spike testing, endurance testing, and scalability testing. The goal is to identify bottlenecks before they reach real users and ensure the software performs reliably under both normal and peak traffic.
Load testing is a subset of performance testing that assesses system behavior under expected load conditions. Performance load testing simulates multiple concurrent users or transactions to determine how the application handles typical usage patterns and increasing workloads.
There are other types of performance testing that are sometimes referred to as “types of load testing”:
The thing is, performance testing and load testing are often considered synonyms, although “performance” is an umbrella term for a variety of other software QA inspections—load testing among them. Regardless of how you approach the classification, each type provides unique insights into different aspects of your application’s performance profile.
Effective performance testing for software applications follows a structured methodology. First, we identify performance criteria and acceptable thresholds based on your business requirements and user expectations. Then, we design test scenarios that replicate real-world usage patterns and prepare the testing environment to match your production setup as closely as possible.
Next, we execute the tests using specialized tools to generate load and collect detailed metrics. Our engineers analyze the results, identifying performance bottlenecks and their root causes. We then provide recommendations for optimization, implement changes when requested, and conduct regression testing to verify improvements. This iterative process continues until your application meets or exceeds all performance requirements.
Of course, each case requires a tailored strategy. There will be differences in how QA engineers approach mobile and web application load testing, how they test load on websites and run stress testing for websites, how they arrange testing system performance and end-to-end tests. Nevertheless, the general pattern remains standard—as described above.
The difference between performance test and load test lies in their scope and objectives, even though these two terms are often mixed up and used as synonyms.
Performance testing is a broader category that evaluates overall system performance characteristics. Those include speed, stability, and scalability. Performance testing is an umbrella term that encompasses multiple testing types to provide a comprehensive performance assessment.
Load vs performance testing can be understood as part of versus whole. Load testing specifically examines system behavior under particular load conditions, focusing on how the application handles concurrent users or transactions at or near expected volumes. Meanwhile, performance testing answers “How well does the system perform overall?”
Load testing and performance testing together answer more specific questions about capacity planning, resource allocation, and how the system responds to different levels of demand.
Response time in software performance testing services measures how long it takes for a system to react to a specific request or action. It’s the interval between a user initiating an action (like clicking a button) and the application providing a complete response (such as displaying results or completing a transaction).
Response time is a critical performance metric because it directly impacts user experience and satisfaction. It can be broken down into components like server processing time, network latency, and client-side rendering time. Our testing protocols measure both average response times and percentile distributions (like 90th or 95th percentile) to identify outliers that might affect user experience even when average times look acceptable.
Website and app performance testing is important because it directly affects your software’s success in the market. Slow or unstable websites and applications frustrate users, damage your reputation, and ultimately reduce revenue. By identifying performance issues before deployment, you can address problems when they’re less expensive to fix and before they impact your customers.
Beyond user satisfaction, performance testing, load testing, and related QA checks help optimize resource utilization, reduce operational costs, and validate your scaling strategy. If you want to get crucial data for capacity planning and preventing outages during high-traffic periods, test application performance.
Finally, performance testing also supports compliance with service level agreements (SLAs) and gives your team confidence that new releases will maintain or improve performance rather than introducing regressions.
In performance, stress, and load testing are the most common QA activities used to check and verify the performance of any software product.
Performance testing is the umbrella term covering various techniques that evaluate speed, responsiveness, and stability. It measures how quickly a system performs under particular workloads and identifies factors affecting system performance. Hence, performance testing entails load testing service and stress testing service.
Stress testing vs performance testing reveals different insights. While performance paints the picture in all the details, stress performance testing is one of its many parts. A stress performance test deliberately pushes systems beyond normal or peak load conditions until they break. Its goal is to identify the breaking point and assess how the system recovers from failure.
Meanwhile, load testing as a service implies examining behavior under expected normal and peak conditions. The goal is to verify that the system can handle anticipated user loads with acceptable performance.
Each testing type provides unique and complementary information. Performance testing gives you the big picture. Load testing confirms your system works properly under expected conditions. Stress testing helps you understand system limitations and failure modes. Together, load, stress, and performance testing form a comprehensive approach to ensuring your applications perform reliably under all circumstances.
Performance testing for websites helps prevent downtime during traffic spikes, reduces page load times, improves user retention, and protects revenue. It also reveals infrastructure inefficiencies before they reach real users – saving both time and money.
Performance testing works by simulating real user loads on your application and measuring response time, throughput, and stability under different conditions. QA Madness engineers use JMeter, Gatling, and k6 to run load, stress, and scalability tests, then deliver actionable reports with bottleneck analysis.
Companies use performance testing to prevent app crashes under high traffic, identify bottlenecks before production, and ensure consistent user experience at scale. QA Madness helps companies of all sizes implement performance testing as a standard part of their release cycle.
Ready to speed up the testing process?