The biggest shopping season is about to kick off. The leaves have started to fall to the ground, the air has a crisp, bitter chill to it, and holiday displays are starting to go up all over town. As major retailers begin bracing for the massive influx in shopping, so too, should eCommerce business owners. Major retailers have to worry about supply and demand, customer and employee safety, and the condition of their stores.
You’d think as an eCommerce store owner, you get to avoid these major headaches, which you do to some degree. However, you have a unique headache of your own to deal with. Making sure your website doesn’t crash is a major issue that all eCommerce store owners must deal with and prepare for.
Prevention Is Key
The last thing you want is to kick off your Black Friday sale and have the entire site crash only a couple of minutes or hours into it. Thankfully, there are things you can do prior to the typical Black Friday traffic spike, to help reduce the risk of your eCommerce site crashing.
- Monitor and Test Your Site. You can use real-user or synthetic monitor to path the paths that users will typically use when accessing your site. This gives your IT team the ability to see what areas are having performance issues and lets them address them before they become a problem.
- Use A CDN For Your Website. A CDN, or content delivery network, is a cloud-based system that uses multiple servers around the world to handle the delivery of your content to your customers. Think of a CDN as a steam vent on a pressure cooker. By opening the vent, you’re going to reduce the pressure and strain that is being put on your local server, which could force a reboot or a crash.
- Mobile Optimization. More than half of all website traffic stems from mobile devices. If your site is not geared to mobile users, you’re missing out on the largest part of the market. Start by removing any plugins, coding, or features that slow down the experience for your mobile users. You can also compress all the webpages for mobile devices to decrease loading times. This reduces strain on your server and reduces the risk of a site or server crash.
Make Changes to Your Site Sooner Rather Than Later
A lot of eCommerce business owners wait until they have a lengthy list of fixes before they hire an IT or design person to correct these issues. This is, of course, assuming that the eCommerce business owner doesn’t have its own IT team. The problem with this method is that it limits the amount of time they have to make the repairs. It takes time to identify why a glitch is happening, what it is all effecting, and how to fix it. If it cannot be fixed, they have to develop a workaround that doesn’t further compromise the integrity of the site or the server.
Need Some Guidance With Your eCommerce Website?
The more time you give them to work on it, the better the results are going to be. Most online store owners who put this off tend to either pay twice as much for rush services or are forced to disable parts of their site because repairs or workarounds could not be completed in time.
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