Gear up for the holiday season: Tips to make your Digital Store crash-proof

The holiday season brings in hordes of people, which in turn affects your website’s performance and User Experience. Black Fridays are notorious for crashing websites and in 2018, merchants on a competing platform registered 699,923 sales every minute during peak traffic.
With an unheard amount of traffic testing the mettle of your servers, bandwidth and logistics, it is important to optimize your website’s performance and UX to suit the needs of the holiday season and keep your customers happy. A crashed website is a lost opportunity.
But you already know that and you’re looking for answers. If you feel like your website needs a retune before the upcoming holiday season, we’ve got a few tips and strategies for you to consider and get your website locked and loaded before the busiest time of the year.

1. Better safe than sorry

Skimping on a reliable platform can kill a business. According to a report by Business Insider, JCrew risked a loss of approximately $700,000 in five hours during Black Friday 2017 when the website was facing technical difficulties.

To circumvent this issue, there are a lot of things you can consider before going live on the biggest sale day like:

• Monitor your website

The paths your customers take while browsing through your website is key. You can deploy synthetic monitors or real users to monitor and document the path a user is taking while accessing and navigating through your website. This monitoring of paths enables the IT team to pinpoint the exact location of bugs that are causing performance issues and rectify that situation before it becomes a problem

• Utilize a CDN

A Content Delivery Network, also known as the CDN, is a geographical-dispersed network of servers, or cloud-based systems, that are responsible for delivering your content to the customers.

By offloading content onto remote servers, you’re reducing the strain being put on a single local server, which further reduces the chances of a reboot or a crash.

• Optimize mobile performance

Shopping on a mobile phone is one of the most convenient ways of shopping and intrinsically, smartphone orders accounted for 43% of total orders. If your website hasn’t been properly optimized to a hand-held’s form factor, you’re not tapping a significant piece of the pie.

By scouring through and removing plugins, coding and/or features that cause a slowdown/crash as well as compressing every webpage, you can reduce the strain being put on a single local server, which further reduces the chances of reboot or a crash.

2. Sooner rather than later

As the majority of eCommerce platform owners don’t have their own IT team and the infrastructure to support it, they wait until they have a significant number of documented bugs, glitches and issues to fix.

While this is acceptable, a compromised system during the busiest time of the year is a recipe for disaster. It takes a considerable amount of time to locate where the glitch is happening and figure out how to fix it. However, many of the bugs are unfixable and for that, the IT team has to circumvent the issue without compromising the integrity of the server.

Conclusion

By circumventing crashes, streamlining navigation & checkout, faster loading speeds through platform optimization and automating processes, shoot your sales up dramatically during the most sensitive time of the year. PennyWise enables you to do all of that, and then some, all-year-round effortlessly while you rake in profits secured.

To learn more about how PennyWise can assist you in setting up your website, head on down to www.pennywisesolutions.com