Whether a business is a brick-and-mortar or a dot.com, the challenges of successfully conducting business online are the same: high user volumes, slow response times for Web requests and ensuring the overall reliability of the service. This paper illustrates how maintaining Web application performance is key to overcoming these e-business challenges and generating revenue. The paper then discusses the importance of maintaining a Web application to ensure customer satisfaction and why load testing is critical to successfully launching and managing Web sites. In addition, it examines various types of load testing and provides a detailed discussion on the load testing process and the attributes of a reliable testing tool. In closing, this paper provides an overview of Mercury Interactive's LoadRunner® load testing solution.