We get the same question every week: which level should I run? Short answer: start with L1 because it’s free. Long answer follows.
Level 1 — Free walk
One user, a real cloud browser, up to 20 pages of the journey. Tells you whether your site responds at all, whether the walk can see real content (or whether bot protection blocks it), what the performance score and verdict look like under no load, and what the 12-check security posture says. Works as a smoke test for any new deploy.
Use it when: you’ve just shipped, you want a baseline, you want to know if something obvious broke. You don’t pay.
Level 2 — Concurrency Test (£29)
Five concurrent users for two minutes. Reveals whether your origin can handle a small spike — the kind a launch tweet might generate. Issues a verifiable performance certificate valid 90 days, an embeddable amber badge, a public report URL, and a full security analysis attached to the same cert.
Use it when: you’re charging customers, you have a launch coming, you want a public proof point. The certificate is the artefact you embed on your site or share with a procurement contact who’s asking about resilience.
Level 3 — Load Test (£49)
Fifty concurrent users for five minutes. Real load — enough to expose origin issues, database contention, slow queries, missing connection pools, untuned worker counts. Issues a green certificate valid 180 days. Performance only — running a 12-check passive security scan alongside a 50-user load test is intrusive and looks like a coordinated attack to most WAFs, so we keep that out.
Use it when: you’re prepping for a campaign, expecting Black Friday-style traffic, or want to know your real ceiling. If you want the security scan too, run L2 first then L3 separately.
Decision shortcut
- “Is my site up and broadly OK?” → L1
- “Can I take a small launch wave?” → L2
- “Will I survive a real spike?” → L3
- “I want both speed and security on a cert” → L2
Re-running
L1 is free and unlimited. L2/L3 are one-off charges per scan; we add a £10 retest credit on certs you’ve already paid for so you can verify a fix without paying full price again.
Questions on this? Post in the Running tests Community board — that’s where most of the L1/L2/L3 discussion happens.