“Don’t wait for your best day to have your worst day.”
-Carlos Sapene
The news has been abuzz this week on issues related to the debacle at the Iowa Caucuses. Reports have been pouring in, blaming the coding of an app developed to transmit reporting efficiently from the voting centers to the central data collection location. Without getting too technical, the issue relates to technology, capabilities, and testing.
I’m never looking to bore people with too many explanations, especially when it relates to politics. We have enough politics in the news. What did strike me, though, is that the issue was something that, in hindsight, should have never happened and has now put the entire process in doubt. The point here is testing. Testing is probably one of the most underrated needs when developing anything on technology, and that includes your website, your funnel, your ads, your apps, anything that relies on technology to deliver your messaging. You could have the best landing page, with the message that converts at such a high rate, you’re sure a significant spend in advertising will yield a high return on your investment. But, how useful is that if when people land on your page, your website doesn’t load?
I like to explain this to our clients by illustrating to them what a website is. You may have heard that your website is hosted on a server. That sounds all techy, so allow me to explain it more in lay man’s terms. Think of your server as a filing cabinet, in the old days (and some places still) filing cabinets held tons of folders which contained information that was important to a business. Now think of your website as one of those files in the filing cabinet. Accessing that file is all good-and-well, while people can walk up to the filing cabinet and pull the file out. Visualize that cabinet sitting in your office, with people passing by and viewing the files. Now visualize what would happen if all of a sudden 50,000 people wanted to see that file at the same time, what would that look like? I’m guessing you’re getting the point. It would overwhelm your entire office, and everyone behind the first five or so to arrive at the cabinet would not be able to see the file or it’s contents so they may try to crunch in to view. That could cause all sorts of problems.
In that example, you begin to get a sense of why testing is essential. Because everything may seem to be doing great; until it’s not. To help people understand these issues more clearly, we’re launching video episodes to cover topics related to testing. In the first episode below, we highlight the importance of load-testing. As you may gather from the story I illustrated for you in this post, load testing allows you to test what would happen if your website or app receives more significant or massive amounts of traffic at one time. It is essential to discover these issues when you can do something about it, not after you’ve lost the business and hurt your brand.