Absolutely every e-commerce business must deal with the problems that arise from sales period website demand at some point. During your sale period, you will experience a much higher rate of lead conversion than usual and this is usually the case even if you haven’t been pushing e-marketing to the max.
Even the biggest companies can sometimes fall into the trap of poor performance monitoring, leading to a huge site crash that taints their reputation. Understanding the types of problem that can arise from this and how you can fix them before your website goes down will ensure your big sale goes ahead without any hiccups.
Plan ahead for the demand you’ve created
Whether it’s seasonal, Black Friday or a pre-Christmas push, it’s likely that you have a sale or two up your sleeve before the year ends. As you already know, sales lead to an increase in traffic which is definitely going to put more of a strain on your site. So if you already know this is going to happen, make sure you plan for it.
It’s never too early to plan ahead for sales periods and the easiest way to do this is to combine efforts with your marketing team. One of the biggest blunders companies make is failing to communicate and it’s communication that helps you to plan for the extra traffic more effectively.
Before you even consider load testing and performance monitoring, talk to your team and establish some figures.
Monitor and load test
If you want to avoid the dreaded site crash caused by sales period website demand, investing in website performance and load testing tools is a must.
Monitoring your site during normal traffic periods will give you an idea of how your website behaves on a normal day. You can use the results of these tests to establish whether your site is struggling in basic areas before you push it to its limit with a load test.
Once you’ve established this baseline, you can load test to diagnose more complicated site issues.
Assemble a performance team
Tackling sales period website demand doesn’t just stop with pre-sale load testing and monitoring. If you have a big event coming up, assembling a team to deal with issues before and during the event will ensure your website stays active throughout the entire period.
Your performance team should be responsible for everything, from testing and resolve website performance issues to monitoring, rerouting and optimising the site during the event.
Finally, it’s important to remember that even the best e-commerce websites encounter hiccups every now and then. So, if your site does encounter problems due to sales period website demand, try not to see it as a failure but as a learning experience.
Website performance monitoring should be an everyday task, so if problems arise ensure you review log files with your performance team to see how you can improve in the future.