Test Your Website Now to Avoid a Nightmare Before Christmas
As the holiday season ramps up, retailers of all sizes need to prepare for another year of record online traffic. It's an easy problem to ignore, since your website runs fine under a normal load and there are so many other high-priority tasks to complete, but ensuring that websites stay up and running under the holiday onslaught is critical to success (and can make or break the entire year).
Nothing can shatter the promise of high sales numbers more definitively than a crashed website, slow-loading pages and broken links. The holiday rush is the toughest test of website performance, creating a stressful nightmare for IT while images of sugar plums are dancing in sales reps’ heads. For many companies, technical issues and downtime can lead to millions of dollars in lost sales, frustrated shoppers and a damaged image.
There's still time for both small and large IT departments to make sure their infrastructure is up to the challenge. Here are three things IT can do to guarantee a happy holiday season:
1. Start monitoring everything now. Sometimes the faults and deficiencies in a website take time to reveal themselves. Companies pour energy into monitoring their website just before the holidays only to discover a serious error that, with enough time, might have been apparent and fixable months before. In essence, if a website is going to fail under heavy load, chances are the problem is already identifiable. Monitoring systems are supposed to be preventative medicine that are best at identifying and addressing risks before they ever become a problem.
During the holiday rush, the most important metric to monitor is uptime. By focusing on availability from the customer's point of view — i.e., monitoring multiple locations in real time — IT puts itself in the best position to succeed.
