5 Critical Signs Your App Needs a Performance Check

With rising user expectations, it’s essential to make sure your app runs smoothly and efficiently. How do you think you can achieve that? A thoughtful design, an intuitive interface, and relevant features are all key.

But if an app lags, crashes, or runs slowly, users will likely uninstall it and move on. To avoid these issues, you need to conduct performance testing and ideally start it before the software is released. However, if your app is already running, how do you know when to check its functionality?

In this article, we’ll discuss the five common signs your app needs performance testing, thus helping you identify issues before they affect users and your company’s reputation.

Performance Testing: What Is It and Why Is It Crucial?

Performance testing is a process that evaluates the speed, responsiveness, and stability of software under a workload. Its primary goal is to identify bottlenecks and ensure high-quality app performance and a seamless user experience. 

To conduct performance testing, testers identify key app performance metrics (KPIs), such as load times, response times, throughput, and memory usage, for performance evaluation. Among the various methods used in this testing, stress and load testing are the two primary ones, but there are several other methods, including:

●      Stress testing (soak + spike testing): it evaluates how a system behaves under extreme conditions or loads beyond its normal capacity to assess the app’s stability and recovery from failures;

●      Load testing: it evaluates the system performance under specific, anticipated loads to identify potential bottlenecks;

●      Volume testing: it tests the system’s ability to handle a large amount of data;

●      Soak testing: it evaluates the system performance over an extended period under sustained load to identify memory leaks or performance degradation.

Performance testing should be done before the software release and scaling, during updates implementation, and deployment. It helps developers find and fix performance-related bottlenecks early and ensures the app functions properly across various devices and environments. 

By doing so, companies significantly enhance user satisfaction, reduce costs related to unexpected problems, and drive lasting app success. Software development company SoftTeco provides comprehensive performance testing services to ensure that your app will function flawlessly and satisfy users’ needs. 

Our load-testing services guarantee that your app will remain responsive, scalable, and able to handle both current and anticipated demands effectively.

5 Signs Indicate That Your App Needs Performance Testing

Let’s consider the five signs that indicate it’s time to test your application performance:

1. Frequent Crashes or Errors

If your app crashes often, it’s time to think about its diagnostic assessment. Among the common reasons for app crashes are outdated operating systems, memory leaks, coding errors, and the inability to handle current loads. 

Whatever the reason is, such issues disrupt the user experience and can have lasting implications for an app’s reputation and future success. Therefore, developers should сonduct a performance testing to identify weak points and bottlenecks in their code and address the root causes of instability. 

Continuous monitoring during performance testing helps catch upcoming errors and crashes early, improving the overall reliability of an app.

2. Long Load Time

When users encounter slow-loading apps, they are less likely to return. This leads to a poor user experience and a low conversion rate. According to Envisage, a web page that takes 1-3 seconds to load can increase the bounce rate by 32%, while a load time of 1-5 seconds increases this rate by 90%. 

Thus, the average page load time should take between 2 to 3 seconds. But what do you do if suddenly the time of loading a page becomes longer? The answer is to look for the reasons. Long load times can result from various factors, including server issues, large app sizes, and device incompatibility. 

Regular performance testing and monitoring are essential to identify these problems and maintain optimal load times. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, and New Relic can help analyze performance metrics and pinpoint bottlenecks. Implementing best practices, like image optimization, caching strategies, and content delivery networks (CDNs) also helps improve the loading speed.

3. Security Alerts

If an application generates many security alerts, such as unauthorized access notifications or anomalies in user behavior, it may indicate potential problems, such as security breaches or performance issues. Security vulnerabilities can lead to inefficient resource utilization, which can slow down the application. 

For example, an attacker trying to exploit weaknesses may overload the servers, resulting in slow response times for users. In addition to poor performance, security risks may arise. It is essential to prevent them in advance in order not to compromise the security of the sensitive data processed by the app.

Developers can use performance testing to identify weaknesses that could be exploited by attackers. By simulating heavy traffic and potential attacks, they can enhance security measures and improve the application’s resilience to prevent unauthorized access and performance issues.

4. Traffic Spikes

Sudden and significant increases in application or service traffic (known as spikes) indicate the need for performance optimization. They often occur during promotional campaigns and seasonal events but can also happen due to system failures or downtimes. 

A traffic spike can overwhelm an app’s capacity, causing slow load times, laggy interactions, or (in some cases) server crashes. This, in turn, will decrease user engagement, reduce conversions, and negatively affect the app’s credibility.

One effective way to prepare for traffic spikes is performance testing. This method allows developers to optimize the app’s resources before a spike occurs. They can also use load testing to simulate normal traffic and then use stress testing to understand how an app performs under extreme conditions. 

Other methods, like endurance testing, help developers evaluate an app’s ability to handle extended operational periods without performance loss. When you address weaknesses proactively, you will avoid or at least minimize slowdowns, lags, and crashes during peak times.

5. Outdated software

Over time, app performance can decline if it isn’t updated timely. This happens because outdated software may be incompatible with new devices and OS versions, thus leading to slower load times, crashes, and security vulnerabilities. 

Obviously, all of these issues diminish user satisfaction. To address these problems, developers rely on regular updates to maintain the optimal level of performance and security of an app. These updates may include code refactoring, migration to new technologies, or implementation of new features. 

However, the integration of new features can lead to unexpected issues and bugs. In this way, performance testing is needed to ensure the new code performs well under expected conditions and integrates smoothly with other parts of the app. Together, updates and performance testing maintain a high-quality user experience, reduce downtime, and enhance security.

In the case when updates of legacy software aren’t feasible yet, performance testing helps identify compatibility issues with newer software. This allows developers to make sure that critical functions remain operational.

The Bottom Line

In general, it’s more expensive to fix an error post-launch than to detect it early in the development process. So, understanding what exactly you need to pay attention to during and after development helps you proactively prevent performance-related errors and deliver high-quality apps. 

By implementing regular performance monitoring and using advanced testing methods and tools, you’ll improve user satisfaction and ensure your app remains efficient, scalable, and resilient as it grows.

Author’s Bio 

Anastasia Grishina
Nastya is a copywriter and content creator at SoftTeco. Her experience of working on various websites allows her to write technical, informative, and SEO-oriented content. She is passionate about learning and writing about emerging technologies, especially in the IT, Salesforce, FinTech, and logistics fields. Her writing blends technical precision with a clear tone, making complex topics accessible to all readers.