The objective of conducting effective performance and load testing is to find out how you web application will perform under real time load.
Before conducting load testing, it is important to have the load requirements like how many people will be accessing the website, how many concurrent users will be accessing at a particular time, what time in the day maximum number of users will be accessing the website, what is the maximum number of users accessing the website, how many processes will be running concurrently, which browsers the users will be accessing (Percentage of users using Internet explorer/Mozilla Firefox/Safari etc.). The success of load testing depends on identifying these requirements as clearly as possible.
For conducting effective load testing, the following steps are important to be performed.
Gather load requirements
Identify the tool which will be used to conduct load testing
Create Non-functional test plan and test cases
Execute test cases
Analyse the result