The California Academy of Sciences is a world-famous science museum and research institution that welcomes over one million visitors each year to its aquarium, indoor rainforest, planetarium and natural history museum. But when it needed to match its on-site scientific wonders with a visually appealing and informative website, it turned to BlazeMeter’s performance testing to ensure a high-quality visitor experience akin to a real museum visit.

The Academy’s developer team was tasked with providing an online user experience that is as engaging as a visit to the museum, helping to inspire visitation and foster broader interest in science. The site houses a wealth of high-definition imagery, videos and dynamic content, supported by thousands of pages of academic resources and materials. This large quantity of material can lead to potential performance issues, especially on the homepage.

To improve site performance, the Academy chose BlazeMeter based on its leadership in performance testing with open source tools. BlazeMeter helped the team test site performance from every angle, including the most visited pages, connection speeds and geographic sources of traffic. BlazeMeter also helped the team validate the performance of one of its external hosting providers, assuring the team that the hosting facility could handle the site load and maintain performance.

“Load testing on the BlazeMeter platform gave us the insights to confirm our predictions,” said Dana Lamb, PMO Manager, California Academy of Sciences. “They helped us make sure the site could handle all types of traffic and updates, helping us ensure that the performance we predicted was actually true.”

The end result is a high-performing website and an improved customer experience. With BlazeMeter’s help, the website can seamlessly manage more than 4 million sessions per year, including up to 20,000 on peak traffic days.

“Continuous performance testing isn’t just about navigating peak traffic, it’s about providing an end-to-end online experience that keeps visitors engaged,” said Alon Girmonsky, CEO and Founder, BlazeMeter. “The Academy’s story is an example of the versatility of performance testing, ensuring that high-quality content can be delivered from any page, from any connection, at any time.”

For more information on the California Academy of Sciences’ work with BlazeMeter, visit https://blazemeter.com/why-we-blaze. And for more information on how to improve site performance through continuous performance testing, visit https://blazemeter.com/.

About BlazeMeter

BlazeMeter ensures delivery of high-performance software by enabling DevOps teams to quickly and easily run open-source based performance tests against any mobile app, website or API at massive scale to validate performance at every stage of software delivery. The rapidly growing BlazeMeter community has over 100,000 developers and includes prominent global brands such as Adobe, Atlassian, Gap, NBC Universal, Pfizer and Walmart as customers. Founded in 2011, the company is headquartered in Mountain View, California and Research & Development in Tel Aviv, Israel.

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