uSwitch.com is the UK's leading impartial online service for home and financial services, offering consumers the comparative information they need to switch suppliers online. All uSwitch.com products embrace the core brand values of being comprehensive, impartial, accurate and simple. The information is provided simply to help customers make the most appropriate product choice based on their own preferences. Switching is easy and usually takes just a few minutes.

It's not unusual for the website to have peaks in activity from time to time, particularly when a key supplier announces a price rise. However, when the company planned a major increase in Marketing activity, including TV advertising, research models forecast a significant increase in visitors to the website.

It was essential for uSwitch to fully understand the impact of users visiting the site in greater numbers and ensure that the switching process was just as effective at peak times. The company needed to protect its marketing investment by ensuring that every customer received a consistently good experience regardless of other visitor traffic.

The company first called in SciVisum in December, who recommended a programme of both tests and retests across its entire product range.

Virtual User Journeys

SciVisum has developed a uniquely flexible test engine that creates 'virtual users' and runs through the multi-page User Journeys they are most likely to make. A User Journey is the path a typical visitor on a site takes to perform an intended task - e.g. an Add-to-Basket journey on a fashion site would perhaps involve going from the homepage, selecting a category at random e.g 'women's wear', then 'shoes', then choosing at random from the products offered style, colour and size, and finally adding the item to the shopping basket.

For uSwitch, each product has its own well-defined User Journey. The site takes information from the visitor, searches from suppliers to offer a choice of cost savings, and then allows the user to complete personal details to actually switch supplier there and then.

It was clear that the first priority was to find out the maximum number of User Journeys each uSwitch product could cope with before there was an excessive slow down or an increase in error rates. SciVisum's SV-Load service achieved this by producing hundreds or thousands of virtual users at the same time, and measuring the experience they receive.

The information on error and slow-down rates at high traffic would give the business team confidence as to how much headroom there was for each product. In addition, any underlying technical root causes that SciVisum could identify would help uSwitch to focus their technical team's resources.

The Results

The package of work agreed consisted of initial rounds of load testing on selected products, followed by a period to identify and fix any issues highlighted. These were then retested 3 months later alongside initial rounds of testing on the remaining products.

The results showed numerically for each uSwitch product at what user volumes the experience became unacceptable.

On a technical note, it's not unusual to find high error rates even though the web farm by all 'normal' measures (CPU load, database queries/second, memory swap etc) is a long way from reaching its limits. That's because there are a number of places in the technology where such limits can inadvertently be designed in. It explains the situation where a system that is struggling to cope with demand has bigger hardware thrown at it and yet continues to perform badly.

The findings at uSwitch highlighted areas of performance that could be quickly addressed without spending money on hardware. This included reducing the load on the server for particular steps, fixing out-of-date image links and identifying bottlenecks in 3rd party software.

Successful Roll-out

Traffic increased with the raised marketing activity as envisaged - TV adverts rolled out and online promotion was ramped up. According to uSwitch's New Product Director:

as a result of increased marketing activity, traffic to the site more than doubled in Q1. The SciVisum service allowed us to identify and understand potential capacity constraints for our technical team to remedy, both on existing products and new products prior to launch.
At uSwitch we feel that one of the key ways to protect our future revenue and to maximise return on our marketing investment, is to understand the full scalability of our products. It is essential that our website is able to cope with our expected increases in traffic.

In the years since, uSwitch has been a regular customer of SciVisum's 24/7 Web site Monitoring services - benefiting from the same dynamic User Journey approach that really does 'do what the users do'.

Additional Information

Will it Work? Six key steps to Stress / Load Testing

Request Demonstration

View our client testimonials If you would like one of our service professionals to contact you to arrange a demonstration of our web testing services or discuss your web site performance goals/needs free of charge please contact us. To contact a service professional call us on +44 (0) 1227 768276 or request a telephone/email call back