Professional vs. In-House Website Load Testing: Which One Do You Really Need?

Volha Shchayuk

Author

Volha Shchayuk

Volha is a seasoned IT researcher and copywriter, passionate about AI, QA, and testing. She turns technicalities into engaging articles, helping you discover and easily grasp the latest IT concepts and trends.

IT researcher

Reviewed by Boris Seleznev

Reviewed by

Boris Seleznev

Boris Seleznev is a seasoned performance engineer with over 10 years of experience in the field. Throughout his career, he has successfully delivered more than 200 load testing projects, both as an engineer and in managerial roles. Currently, Boris serves as the Professional Services Director at PFLB, where he leads a team of 150 skilled performance engineers.

Thriving in the fierce digital space is what every business strives for. While high-traffic events like targeted marketing campaigns, paid ads, product launches, and seasonal spikes certainly help win over customers and skyrocket sales, they also abruptly expose hidden website vulnerabilities to users. To assess website readiness for traffic surges and prevent weaknesses, such as slow page loading, unresponsive forms, and frozen checkouts, more and more businesses are considering load testing.

The truth is, either strategy has its own set of pros, cons, and trade-offs. Choosing the option suitable for your business depends on your available budget, expected timelines, overall technical maturity, and many other critical factors. So, if you’re hesitant about whether to turn to load testing outsourcing or build an internal team from the ground up, continue reading this guide. We’ll look into both strategies, uncover their pros and cons, and explore scenarios where each approach can work best for your business.

Why Website Load Testing Matters Before Big Campaigns

According to SiteBuilderReport, 79% of buyers won’t purchase from an online store again if they’ve previously experienced performance issues with the platform. If you don’t want to lose new customers, repeat business, sales, and revenue, running website load testing before big campaigns is a must. Doing so not only exposes technical bottlenecks and evaluates how your system behaves under stress, peak traffic, and high concurrency but also greatly reduces business risks like downtime, abandoned cards, and wasted marketing spend. 

McKinsey underscores that performance testing — load, stress, and endurance — is a must for modern large-scale applications. With that in mind, the question still lingers: which approach to load testing should you choose? Let’s compare professional vs in-house load testing and address this problem below.

What In-House Website Load Testing Looks Like

Internal website load testing is handled by company developers and performance engineers who:

Note that gathering an in-house team responsible for website crash prevention is rational only if smaller tests are needed or when existing teams already have ample experience in performance testing.

Pros of In-House Website Load Testing

Assembling a crew of in-house specialists for load testing brings the following benefits:

Full Control Over Test Scenarios and Environments

With an internal team, businesses gain complete oversight over how load tests are planned, designed, and executed. QA engineers have full freedom to customize test scenarios, prioritize specific user journeys, fine-tune environments, and implement unique edge cases that cater to company products, services, and customers. And as all test data, infrastructure, and instruments remain within a particular organization, it’s easier for in-house teams to oversee the entire testing pipeline, maintain high levels of security and compliance, iterate faster, and ensure sensitive information is always under internal control.

Familiarity With Codebase and UX Flows

In-house load testing teams know the ins and outs of your website, including its codebase, business logic, microservices, dependencies, integrations, and database structures. As such, performance engineers can easily detect weak spots in your system, anticipate issues based on past incidents, and prioritize user-centric features and UX flows. They can also quickly identify the root causes of fresh weaknesses and promptly apply the necessary patches. 

Potential Long-Term Cost Efficiency

While setting up the necessary testing infrastructure and training in-house specialists may require significant upfront investment, the long-term payoffs are yet more substantial. Once all tools, frameworks, test scripts, data, environments, and human resources are in place, they can be reused across multiple campaigns, fully eliminating reliance on third-party services and, thus, lowering overheads. This not only saves money but also lets internal crews run tests more frequently, catch performance issues early, and ensure your website operates consistently regardless of traffic and load.

Cons of In-House Website Load Testing

In-house load testing isn’t a panacea for impeccable website performance. Its main drawbacks include:

Limited Performance Engineering Expertise

Many internal QA teams don’t include any dedicated performance testers, which brings about several issues. A lack of performance engineering knowledge makes advanced test scenarios like stress checks or complex concurrency difficult to design correctly. Plus, teams without relevant experience struggle to simulate real user behavior, traffic spikes, and edge cases, and often overlook subtle performance bottlenecks like API latency and memory leaks. All these gaps lead to inaccurate test coverage and invisible glitches slipping into production.

Tooling Gaps and Misconfigured Tests

Among DIY website load testing limitations, businesses often encounter tooling gaps and misconfigured tests. Teams without significant performance testing expertise may find it hard to effectively use open-source tools since they require a solid knowledge of parameterization, scripting, load models, and environment setup. As a result, internal QA engineers set up incorrect parameters, such as improper ramp-up times, unrealistic concurrency levels, and incomplete multi-step flows, leading to defective test cases and faulty results that undermine the performance of your platform.

Risk of Blind Spots and Over-Optimistic Assumptions

Quite often, teams lacking performance engineering skills focus on testing solely happy paths, where user flows are smooth and glitch-free. Because of such an approach, engineers miss real-world user behavior, overlooking and exacerbating blind spots like concurrent user activities, network delays, and unexpected traffic surges. The danger of over-optimistic assumptions, on the other hand, lies in creating a false sense of system stability, which ultimately causes slow responses, failed API calls, a degraded UX, and even complete website blackouts — not only during big campaigns but also during off-peak periods.

Time Constraints During Campaign Prep

Most in-house crews simultaneously juggle development, bug fixes, deployment, maintenance, and support, which leaves little time for conducting efficient and quality load testing before high-traffic events. As a result, load tests are rushed, inaccurate, or oversimplified, which puts website performance at risk and leads to sluggish page loads, failed transactions, hanging forms, and other overwhelming issues.

What Professional Website Load Testing Involves

Unlike its in-house equivalent, professional website load testing is conducted by third parties and offers:

So, is outsourced load testing worth it? Based on a report by Technavio, the outsourced software testing market size is expected to increase by $96.81 billion, at a CAGR of 22.5% by 2029. This clearly demonstrates that the market is going to expand rapidly, with more and more businesses gradually shifting towards outsourcing services rather than relying on internal teams.

Pros of Professional Website Load Testing

The benefits of professional load testing encompass:

Immediate Access to Specialized Performance Engineers

By opting for outsourced website load testing, organizations gain swift access to experienced performance testers who understand how real traffic behaves under various conditions, where and when systems are likely to break down, and how to model realistic peak bursts. 

High-Fidelity Load Scenarios and Tooling

Dedicated load testers are well-versed in advanced testing frameworks and tools that help create high-fidelity test scenarios, mimicking complex traffic, such as user surges, ramp-ups, checkout flows, API dependency failures, and other real-world issues.

Objective, Unbiased Testing and Reporting

External performance engineers are more objective and impartial when it comes to identifying system bottlenecks and failures. They examine the platform from an independent, user-focused perspective, free from internal pressure, blind spots, and overly positive assumptions. This approach helps develop unbiased reports, including detected issues, metrics, and recommended patches.

Faster Turnaround for High-Stakes Events

Professional website load testing services ensure speed, efficiency, and a faster turnaround, which is crucial for time-sensitive campaigns and high-stakes events. Rapid testing cycles let teams fully prepare websites for massive traffic hits without stacking up last-minute failures.

Infrastructure and Tools Included

With load testing teams outsourced, companies don’t need to invest in costly testing infrastructure with paid tools, frameworks, and other expensive resources. This approach also eliminates the need for ongoing maintenance and support, which not only cuts expenses but also grants full access to the latest testing technologies and enterprise-grade software.

Cons of Professional Website Load Testing

Although professional load testing offers compelling perks, it doesn’t lack disadvantages:

Need for Clear Scope and Access

For load testing to be successful, it requires a clear scope outlining which flows, pages, and features should be tested, as well as access to staging URLs, environments, user journeys, and credentials. This might necessitate extra preparation and coordination from the company’s side and expose private data to certain security risks.

Short Onboarding for Complex Sites

It can take professional teams some time to study relevant documentation and comprehend the mechanics of your website with its internal workings before they can actually run load checks. The downside is that the longer the onboarding takes, the more delayed testing becomes. 

Smaller Tests May Be Cheaper In-House

Outsourced website load testing is best suited for large-scale events and campaigns. In case you need smaller or less complex checks, dealing with them inside of your organization is a more cost-effective option.

Cost Comparison — Which Approach Makes Sense?

Now that you understand the two popular approaches to load testing, along with their pros and cons, let’s look at cost — the key factor in deciding which strategy to follow.

In-house load testing incurs expenses related to developers’ and QA engineers’ salaries, ongoing training, custom testing infrastructure and tools, and maintaining test environments. Outsourced load testing, on the other hand, involves only project-based or retainer fees, with no need to squander budget on setting up and supporting the necessary infrastructure. 

All in all, the final decision of which approach to choose depends on internal skill levels, the importance of your website in driving sales volumes, and the bottom line, how often you need to run load tests, and the time available before launching a high-traffic event.

When In-House Load Testing Is Usually the Best Fit

Running load checks inside your company is the right fit in the following scenarios:

When Professional Load Testing Is the Better Choice

Turning to load testing outsourcing is the better choice in instances, such as:

Hybrid Load Testing: A Practical Middle Ground

If you’re still unsure of which strategy to adopt, there’s a solution that combines the best of both worlds: hybrid load testing. It involves both internal crews that perform small-scale tests to catch and mend minor performance issues and professional website load testing services focused on occasional high-stress tests. This hybrid approach offers greater cost-efficiency, flexibility, and on-demand expertise, ensuring your platform works as expected in routine operations and under extreme load.

What to Do Next

In case you want to be well-equipped for your next big campaign, high-traffic event, or product launch, follow these actionable steps:

Final Thoughts

How to load test a website properly — relying on an internal team, professional help, or a combined approach — is a matter of your inner capabilities, timelines, budget, and technical readiness. But if you want to be confident that your website firmly withstands an unlimited number of users and generates revenue non-stop, seeking specialists who know how to do everything right is wise. Discover how PFLB can help you, and be fully armed for your next traffic hit.