Website Front End Performance Testing Series - Part 2 - What is the Front End of a Website?

At the beginning of the month of April 2014, I started writing this article series named Website Front End Performance Testing. As I mentioned in the Part 1, this series contains dozen of articles which covers web application or website front end performance testing from basics to advanced concepts. This is the second part of WFEPT article series and we cover up separating frontend of a web application within this part. 

Backend Vs. Frontend

When I was starting my career as a Product Performance Engineer, I had this mess in my mind about how to separate backend and frontend of a software product for performance testing. I had to went through several article readings to resolve that mess about backend vs. frontend.

At the end of the day, I understood that, separation of backend and frontend of a software product in performance testing depends on the behavior of that particular software product. Before we start website frontend performance testing, it is necessary to clearly identify and understand what is the frontend.

Website Front End Performance Testing Series - Part 1 - Introduction

How many times have you visited to a website to accomplish a task and suddenly went to a different website because home page of the website that you visited first took long time to load? “46% of visitors will leave a preferred site if they experience technical or performance problems.” (Juniper Communications) In other words, “If your website is slow, your customers will go away!”.

Advent of Web 2.0 technologies like Javascript, Ajax, single page applications, now web applications are dynamic. Client side should be given due importance as well besides server side processing. A web application can be tested at two levels using two different types of software performance testing methods.

• Front-end / Client side
• Back-end / Server side 

Server side issues are extremely important because it can make the web application unstable and unusable. But it’s not the end of story in web application’s performance testing. Client side performance issues are also critical from performance perspectives because they have more impact on user experience. Furthermore, website front-end performance testing is fast as compared to back-end performance assessment which need a lot of requirement gathering, script modeling, load generation, code profiling etc. We are not going to discuss about front end performance testing in details here as we discuss about it in part three.