With the festive season not too far around the corner, and with consumers starting to think more about online shopping, it’s important to think about whether your eCommerce business is prepared for what could be a very hectic Black Friday if the right decisions beforehand haven’t been made!
Over recent months, the current pandemic has been seen to accelerate the shift away from physical stores to digital shopping, as more people turn to eCommerce to purchase items (they might have otherwise purchased in person). With that in mind, Christmas fast approaching and consumers looking to prepare earlier this year, we’ve put together a few tips that will help you make sure your eCommerce site is prepared and open for business from Black Friday through to Cyber Monday.
Limit testing
It’s important to test your capacity and performance regularly. This can help you see where you might need to make changes to your server configuration or to see if any code is broken. We can provide staging environments to help you test in a non-live environment to help prevent potential issues that occur during code deployment.
Use Caching
If you use caching, it means that every time a user re-visits a site, it should load all the important data which means you may be able to process sales quicker. The faster a user can complete a journey through a website, the more capacity you can have for new visitors.
Analyse and Scale
Using historical sales records and web traffic data from years previous can allow you to estimate the amount of traffic that is likely to reach your website. With traffic likely to be higher this year, you can use this as a judgement for the capacity you will need to help you predict future trends and traffic spikes.
Help from your hosting provider
Is your host or hosting equipment capable of handling the demand? It’s not too late to look at upgrading your resources on your host or increasing capacity on your server hardware. It’s worth getting in touch with your hosting provider to discuss your options, as some things may be able to be completed within just a couple of hours.
If you find yourself needing some assistance or have any concerns over eCommerce hosting, have any queries or would like any more information please don’t hesitate to get in touch. We’ll be more than happy to work with you and help your eCommerce business choose the best option – 0161 464 6101.
