Every year, traffic spikes linked to Black Friday, end-of-year holidays or major product launches put digital infrastructures under immense pressure.
Overloaded servers, increased response times, blocked checkout pages… These red flags quickly turn into lost revenue and a degraded user experience.
In 2025, as speed and reliability have become key criteria for customer loyalty, load testing is no longer a luxury. It is a strategic performance lever for any digital business.
2025 Trends: Increasing Pressure on Digital Services
The digital landscape is evolving fast. In 2025, several trends reinforce the importance of load testing:
Mobile-first dominates: over 70% of online purchases are made on smartphones.
Cloud and microservices architectures multiply technical dependencies.
The rise of AI and automation generates higher volumes of requests.
Regulations (DORA directive, GDPR, NIS2) impose strict requirements regarding resilience and service continuity.
In this context, digital performance becomes a strategic, economic and regulatory challenge.
A simple slowdown can now have direct consequences on both business and brand reputation.
What Is Load Testing and Why Is It Crucial?
A load test consists of simulating heavy traffic on an application or website to measure its ability to withstand a massive influx of users.
This approach helps identify breaking points, anticipate bottlenecks and optimise the system’s overall performance.
The Principle: Anticipate Rather Than Repair
Instead of waiting for an outage to occur during a critical period, load testing allows you to evaluate your infrastructure’s stability and scalability before it is put to the test.
It is a controlled crash test, carried out under realistic conditions, to avoid a real crash during your most important commercial campaigns.
Key Challenges for Digital Businesses
Guarantee service availability even under exceptional traffic peaks.
Preserve customer satisfaction by ensuring a smooth experience.
Optimise hosting costs by adjusting the capacity actually needed.
Strengthen the reliability of critical systems (payment, authentication, APIs, etc.).
How Does a Load Test Work with Ekara?
At Ekara, we support companies in implementing customised load testing scenarios tailored to their business challenges.
Our teams reproduce the most strategic user journeys: login, search, add-to-cart, checkout, API requests, etc.
Thanks to our globally distributed agents, we can evaluate your service performance under real-world usage conditions, both in France and internationally.
Building User Journeys with Ekara Studio
User journeys are designed using Ekara Studio, an intuitive tool that allows you to record, visualise and replay your customers’ key interactions on your web or mobile applications.
Through this graphical interface, your teams can:
Create realistic scenarios without writing a single line of code,
Configure traffic variations or usage contexts,
Reuse these scenarios for both load testing and continuous performance monitoring.
The result: a faithful simulation of user behaviour and load tests fully aligned with the real customer experience.
Key Phases of an Ekara Load Test
Scope definition: identification of critical pages, transactions and journeys to be tested.
Scenario creation: built with Ekara Studio for realistic and actionable tests.
Traffic simulation: progressive load generation to reach or exceed expected peaks.
Results analysis: measuring response times, errors and saturation thresholds.
Technical recommendations: concrete advice to improve stability and performance.
Learn more about our Ekara load testing solution
The Concrete Benefits of Load Testing Before Traffic Peaks
1. Prevent Major Financial Losses
An e-commerce website down during Black Friday costs thousands of euros per minute.
Load testing prevents these incidents and guarantees service availability when it matters most.
2. Improve User Experience
A smooth and fast browsing experience builds user trust and engagement.
With load testing, you ensure your customers enjoy an optimal experience—even under heavy traffic.
3. Help IT Teams Operate with Confidence
Load testing provides valuable insights to technical teams:
they can optimise resources, adjust server configurations and anticipate failures.
Best Practices to Succeed with Your Load Tests in 2025
To maximise the value of load testing, here are some key best practices:
Test early and often: don’t wait until the eve of Black Friday. Regular testing helps track progress over time.
Simulate realistic scenarios: with Ekara Studio, create journeys that reflect real user behaviour.
Measure key KPIs: response time, error rate, latency, CPU load, memory consumption, etc.
Correlate with real-world data: combine load testing with Ekara Real User Monitoring (RUM) for a complete view.
Document and iterate: each test should fuel future optimisations.
Ekara: Your Partner in Digital Performance and Observability
Ekara fits into a holistic approach to digital performance and observability.
In addition to load testing, our platform continuously monitors user experience quality through:
Synthetic monitoring to track availability 24/7,
Real User Monitoring (RUM) to measure real-world performance,
Correlation analysis to identify the root causes of incidents.
In 2025, Don’t Suffer Your Traffic Peaks—Prepare for Them
Traffic peaks like Black Friday, sales or seasonal events are major opportunities… provided your services can handle the load.
Don’t let an undersized infrastructure sabotage your marketing efforts.
Plan your load tests with Ekara now and ensure your users enjoy a smooth, fast and uninterrupted experience.
Request your Ekara load test and calculate your ROI with our dedicated simulator: I’m calculating my ROI.