How to get your website prepared for the onslaught of Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Best Deal On Cyber Monday: For upon |Make sure your back-end website infrastructure can cope with peaks in users

For many UK marketers, it seems easy to forget that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are recent imports from the US, rather than long-established dates in the marketing calendar.

Yet, Black Friday has not only caught on with marketers but also the British public, with this day alone generating around £7 billion in online sales in the UK in 2017. It’s also becoming a worldwide phenomenon, being embraced by retailers and consumers across Europe, Asia, and beyond.

However, some marketers risk losing out on this retail frenzy, because they have not considered how their e-commerce offering might cope with the resulting spikes in demanding e-consumers to their website.

When it comes to investment in their e-commerce sites too many marketers are focused on creating a standout, user-friendly, and engaging front-end that’s easy to navigate and checkout, but neglect investing in the website’s back-end infrastructure. Without the appropriate attention and investment in the back end, as well as the front end, brands are left with a website that will deliver poor performance or could even crash during the peak periods of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This will have a negative impact on their sales at this vital time of year, and risk damaging their reputation.

Strong server performance is key

A smooth functioning server during peak times is what every e-commerce offering requires, so it’s critical that marketers have an understanding of their web server’s available resources. They must ask themselves are they aware of the current load levels on their site? And what is the free resource above possible spikes in users?

However, it’s important not to be fooled by ‘average load’ levels on the website. For example, your site might have an average load of 40%, so in theory, you will have 60% resource spare. But in busy times your users and ecommerce processes can cause spikes of up to 90% of the server’s resource. Anything over 90% capacity and process queueing starts and the website generally slows up. While small load peaks can be absorbed, during busy periods, such as Black Friday, these spikes can be continuous and potentially take down the website. Best Deal On Cyber Monday.

How to improve server performance

A variety of options are available to reduce the impact of load spikes and aid server performance. Ironing out clunky application processes and fixing software errors is a good start. Also, review, and where appropriate, effectively tune and configure the server stack, which can save thousands of pounds in excessive hosting costs, and improve website speeds and reliability during high load times.

Intelligent website caching can help reduce server load by as much as 50%. Caching services are offered by companies such as CloudFlare and the content delivery network KeyCDN, which are fairly straightforward to implement.

For those with a good back-end system that can’t cope with peaks in users on one or two days of the year, it’s worth investing in a queueing system. This is ideally suited to those brands that sell products or services that can’t be purchased elsewhere, so the customer is usually happy to wait. Best Deal On Cyber Monday.

If you operate on a shared server it’s much harder to manage issues associated with peaks, but there are tools available that help provide website caching and bot blocking to mitigate issues during spikes in users. A good web development agency will be able to advise and deliver on all these aspects of improving server performance.

With the issues caused by spikes it can be worth considering upgrading your server to enable your website to cope better, but bear in mind you will be committed to the upgrade for at least a 12-month period. With server specifications continuously improving it’s important to avoid signing up for long-term contracts.

Also, don’t think that just because you have a server in the cloud your site won’t go down. The chances are that your cloud hosting resource is limited in the same way as a physical server.

Spread out marketing campaigns/reporting

It might seem obvious to focus your marketing efforts on driving consumers to make an online purchase on Black Friday. However, this is bound to cause spikes on your website that can slow down or take the site offline. To relieve the pressure on your website, consider spreading your marketing campaigns and promotions across longer periods to lighten those loads.

Also, don’t unnecessarily add to the burden on your website around peak times with heavy reporting and big application code changes. It never ends well.

Ensure emergency support 24/7

It’s vital that if your website crashes, or encounters other serious issues, you have the correct contact details of the web developers and the server hosting company; and have the appropriate agreement that means you can, for example, wake them at 3 a.m. to fix a major problem. Usually, this means having a service level agreement for your website application which is usually separate from hosting support. Make sure you have both elements covered.

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday fast approaching this is the final opportunity for marketers to ensure that their back-end infrastructure is ready and can successfully cope with the peaks in users and exceptional revenue opportunities that these two days provide.

This article was first published here.

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