Performance Review: How Bloomreach Content Stacks Up

Bloomreach Content is a headless content management system (CMS) built for commerce. It allows companies to manage their storefront, easily add products to pages, and most importantly, drive results fast. 

But simply saying the results are fast is meaningless without hard data. That’s why our team conducted performance testing for the Bloomreach Content (SaaS) Page Delivery API and Site Management API in a standard environment with our default production provisioning.  

The Page Delivery API is the primary customer-facing API for rendering sites for end users,  making it critical for fast-rendering sites and a high-quality user experience. This API is optimized for low latency and high concurrency. 

The Site Management API is a developer REST API with support for standard create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations. It is used for the initial setup and ongoing improvement of a site. 

To see the complete results of our testing, download our whitepaper today. 

But why test in the first place? Why do those results even matter? Because in today’s digital commerce marketplace, speed and performance are everything. 

Why Performance Testing Matters

Performance testing helps determine the limitations of a content management system or any website under typical loads. It also helps in making sure the site is fine tuned, stable, and consistently meeting expectations with optimal resource utilization. 

By finding bottlenecks within the application, performance testing helps teams facilitate the processes of fixing those issues and keeping everything running at peak performance. Measuring response time and analyzing infrastructure allows for consistency in application performance for the scalability of the product. 

Nearly every ecommerce business shares at least one common KPI — generate revenue. 

While there are dozens of different paths to accomplishing that goal, nearly all of those paths involve a company’s ecommerce website performing optimally. That is what makes optimizing performance so important — long load times for a website can open the door for a slew of problems that companies want no part of.  

Just a few of the unwanted side effects caused by a website that does not perform up to the standards of those who use it are:

• Anonymous guests/visitors not turning into customers

• Lack of customer retention 

• Poor brand sentiment

• Negative SEO impact 

At Bloomreach, we conduct performance tests to ensure our solutions meet or exceed customer expectations as often as possible. 

A Peek at our Results

Let’s look at two of our higher-profile tests — high traffic to a single page and high traffic to a single document. These tests help show how Bloomreach Content performs in high pressure situations where an abundance of customers are consuming what’s on a company’s website. 

In the high traffic to a single page test, we tested a high number of concurrent requests to a single page with a typical number of documents (20, specifically). The default caches were fully enabled for this test. 

This test represents a fairly common use case for a frequently updated, content-rich page. This could be a site’s homepage or another built-out category page. 20 documents would be typical for a page with many separate banners or components in a single page layout. 

The test was executed for several minutes with a cluster of 40 separate test clients running two simulated users, with no delay between requests. 

The results were overwhelmingly positive. With caches fully enabled, average response times were below 100 milliseconds for nearly every request, including 90% under 60 milliseconds and 50% under 45 milliseconds. Sustained throughput is approximately 1,600 requests per second (RPS), or over four billion requests per month. The default provisioning of Bloomreach Content can handle enormous levels of traffic without active tuning. 

Similarly, the test for high traffic to a single document also came back with positive results for Bloomreach Content, and even showed slightly faster results than the full-page use case. 

This test included a high number of concurrent requests to a single document. This is a common use case for a document that might be used for special purposes outside normal page management, such as a banner in a pop-up dialogue box. 

Response times were quite fast as throughput wound up being approximately 2,000 RPS. 

To learn more about these specific tests and see the complete results of our testing, download our performance review whitepaper. 

Bloomreach Content Helps Drive Revenue

Based on the performance results in the whitepaper, you can be confident that Bloomreach Content will perform well for any kind of ecommerce experience. This is key for ensuring your company can successfully implement its commerce-driving strategies and boost revenue. 

If you're interested in learning more about Bloomreach Content, schedule a personalized demo today.