Tips for Preventing a Website Crash on Black Friday
With Christmas just weeks away, retailers are preparing for one of the biggest internet shopping events of the year, Black Friday, which marks the start of the Christmas season. As consumers are increasingly choosing to shop online, and Black Friday promotions are set to encourage this even more, retailers must ensure their websites are up to the task. Not only should your website be quick to load and reliable, but the user experience on Black Friday should be the same or better than any other day.
As with any internet shopping event, retailers are likely to experience an increased volume of site traffic. This can put a huge strain on sites, putting them at risk of slowing or, worse yet, crashing altogether. It was revealed by Barclays that this is the biggest fear among retailers this year, with 51 percent of retailers dreading their website crashing during the Christmas season. It's not hard to see why, given that company profits and reputation are at stake. Mitigating the risk of a poorly performing website is possible, if not vital.
Preparing for Black Friday
Retailers must have a performance test and monitoring strategy in place so that they can ensure a smooth and responsive customer experience during the Christmas season. It's important to regularly test your site's ability to handle expected and unexpected volumes. There are two monitoring approaches that should be considered: synthetic and real user. Synthetic monitoring is reliable, consistent and provides a historical view that reveals repeating patterns over time. Real user monitoring, on the other hand, gathers volumes of data and provides useful insights into real-time engagement similar to active traffic patterns.
Using either of these tools can be hugely beneficial, but a combination of the two enables site owners to see exactly how site performance is impacting your business — e.g., identifying how many shoppers are impacted by a problem. This will ensure that all shoppers are able to view content exactly how it should appear, and transactions are completed without a hitch.
