Performance Optimizing End-to-End Tests

End-to-end (E2E) tests are essential for confidence in shipping software. But as your test suite grows, you might notice your CI times ballooning and developers complaining that tests are “too slow.” Performance problems in E2E tests can quickly kill team productivity.

It’s not inevitable. By thinking critically about test design, environment, and tooling, you can optimize E2E tests for speed and reliability.

Understand Where the Time Goes

Before optimizing anything, measure it. Slow tests can result from:

• Long test setup and teardown
• Redundant or overlapping test coverage
• Network latency, especially in cross-browser tests
• Flaky retries masking underlying slowness

Without visibility into test performance, it’s all guesswork. That’s why analytics is your first weapon. Tools like TestResult help you identify your slowest tests and trends over time so that you can start performance tuning.

Make Tests Smaller and More Focused

Bloated tests are slow tests. Instead of end-to-end flows covering 10 steps (including unrelated paths), aim for:

• Testing only what needs to be tested in E2E
• Moving validation of small units of logic to unit tests
• Avoiding over-asserting (testing too many things at once)

Small, focused tests fail faster, run faster, and are easier to maintain.

Use Parallelization Effectively

Playwright supports parallel test execution out of the box. Many teams underuse this feature or disable it due to flaky tests.

• Fix tests to be stateless and independent
• Split your test workload intelligently across workers
• Use sharding on CI to isolate test execution in different environments

Optimizing for parallel runs can reduce E2E test suite times from hours to minutes.

Cut Out Unnecessary Waits

Check your tests for:

• Hardcoded sleep() calls (try to avoid these whenever possible!)
• Overly generous timeouts
• Unnecessary polling

Playwright’s waiting mechanisms (like waitForSelector()) are smart. Use them instead of static waits to speed things up without sacrificing reliability.

Cache What You Can

Some test steps (like logging in) are repeated in every scenario. Instead of redoing them every time:

• Use API-based logins where possible
• Reuse browser contexts or storage state
• Preload data with fixtures

Playwright makes it easy to save and reuse state. Smart caching can shave minutes off test runs.

Monitor Test Performance Over Time

It’s not enough to optimize once. Test suites grow, regressions happen. Having historical performance data is key.

This is exactly where TestResult shines:

• Track average test duration over time
• Spot regressions before they hurt deploy speed
• Identify problematic tests or patterns

Analytics turns guesswork into targeted action.

Fix Flaky Tests to Avoid Wasted Time

Flaky tests are time wasters. They:

• Trigger retries that make runs longer
• Undermine developer trust in CI
• Hide real failures

TestResult’s flakiness insights help you find and fix them systematically.

Build Optimization Into Your Process

Finally, make performance a shared goal:

• Add performance checks to PR reviews
• Monitor metrics continuously
• Budget time for test maintenance

It’s much cheaper to keep tests fast than to fix a monster suite that’s gotten out of control. End-to-end tests are crucial, but they shouldn’t be a bottleneck. By applying these strategies, teams can keep confidence high while staying fast.

If you want help visualizing and improving your Playwright test performance, check out TestResult. It’s built to make Playwright test analytics simple, actionable, and developer-friendly.