A Medley of Frontend and Backend Performance Testing Learn how to leverage both protocol-level and browser-level tools when it comes to performance testing.

A medley of frontend and backend performance testing is needed to make sure that you are optimising the performance of your websites. Learn how to incorporate these in to your testing strategies!

The golden rule of web performance states that for most web pages, less than 10–20% of the end user response time is spent getting the HTML document from the web server to the browser while 80-90% of the end user response time is spent on the frontend. When we talk about performance testing, the most common activity that we do is to load test our backend servers. We come to a realisation that once we have optimised our servers and databases, that our application is now performant. However, this should not be the case. Just because our servers have returned the response to a specific request doesn't mean that our users can see the response on the web page yet. There are many factors affecting frontend performance as well and it's as equally important to test to make sure that our users have the best user experience. Historically, when we think of frontend and backend performance, we have to use separate tools. But what if there is one tool that can do this both? In this talk, I want to introduce you to both frontend and backend performance testing and why a medley of these testing activities are needed to make sure that your website is performant. I'll also give a quick walkthrough as to how tools such as k6 can help with running both protocol-level (how performance testing is normally run through concurrent interactions at the protocol layer) and browser-level tests (testing with real browsers to provide a more realistic performance test). By the end of this talk, you should be equipped with new knowledge regarding frontend and backend performance testing which you can apply to your work projects.