September is almost over and the festive season is near.
Your customers are probably delaying their shopping plans for that big sale.
Well, at least I am.
So, how are you ready to optimize eCommerce store for the festival season.
Don’t worry if you do not know. We got your back.
Optimize Your Ecommerce Store for High Traffic
Here are some super easy points to ensure that your site is traffic-ready.
- Check your website up and running
- Upgrade to the Best Hosting Provider
- Security is Everything
- Enable Your CDN
- Optimize For All Devices
- Consider Migrating to a Better Platform
- Test Your Environment
#1 Check your website up and running
Since more and more people are going to show up to your website for holiday shopping and this is going to put stress on your servers.
The worst thing you could lose your website traffic to is a crash.
If you are expecting a lot of traffic but don’t trust your website enough to handle that rush then you must have a load test.
Learn:
- What is Load Testing? (An Ultimate Guide)
- 8 Reasons Why Load Testing is Important?
- 9 Top Open Source eCommerce Load Testing Tools
- Top 5 Best eCommerce Testing Services
You can test your website speed on GTmetrix.
#2 Upgrade to the Best Hosting Provider
Most business owners make the mistake of choosing either shared hosting or a poorly configured setup. Usually, shared hosting can’t handle the rush even if you’re a medium business.
Cloud hosting is one of the best options in the market right now. They are secure, resourceful, and scalable.
Once you opt for the best hosting provider, you don’t have to sweat over speed, security, and support. Choose the ones with 24*7 Expert Support so that even if your website goes down at any time, they are able to fix the issue within minutes.
Read how we Increased the JadeBlue Speed and Performance by 2X with our powerful hosting.
#3 Security is Everything
Just like us, cybercriminals love seasonal sales too.
Since most business owners don’t really care about website security. This, in turn, leads to more customer data breaches during seasonal sales.
Here are some quick tips to make sure you’ve ensured customer security:
1. Security Audit
Check if your eCommerce transactions, network access points, customer logins, and everything else is secure.
If you are not a security expert. Contact us for consultation.
2. Run cyber attack tests
Run both common and recent approaches to cyber-attacks and see if your website can take it.
If not, then ask your network admins to patch the flaws before the holiday season starts.
3. Get HTTPS
If you still don’t have HTTPS, you are a hundred steps back from your competitors.
Use SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) authentication to let your visitors know that their personal information safe with you.
A lock icon will be enabled along with a green address bar:
#4 Enable Your CDN
I can’t emphasize enough the power of Content Delivery Networks.
By offloading your servers, they will let them do their job efficiently. Other than that, make sure your server is powerful.
With dedicated and cloud hosting, you don’t have to worry about power.
However, if you are on shared hosting, ensure that you have a finely configured server.
#5 Optimize For All Devices
79% of smartphone users have made a purchase online using their mobile devices in the last 6 months. 62.24% of people own a mobile phone in 2021.
Imagine how much revenue you are losing if your website is not mobile-optimized.
Also, make sure you are optimizing your eCommerce store for tablets and pads as well.
Test the entire purchasing process on every possible browser and device to see if there’s any problem.
#6 Consider Migrating to a Better Platform
Shoppers are impatient (Been there, done that).
When the website is far from being user-friendly, you lose the revenue there, and then it is not coming back.
Thus, try to move to a platform that responds well to the users and supports every device. For instance, Magento and WooCommerce.
Learn and take the right decision:
- Magento vs WooCommerce: An Ultimate Battle of the Best Platforms
- Magento vs OpenCart: The Only Comparison Guide You should Read
- Magento vs Shopify: The Complete Ecommerce Comparison Guide (2023)
- Magento Commerce vs Commerce Cloud vs Open Source: Which One to Go for?
- Magento Community vs Enterprise Edition 2023: Pros and Cons Compared
- Magento 1 vs Magento 2: Top 7 Differences between M1 and M2 (2023)
#7 Test Your Environment
Even if you have optimized the eCommerce store for the holiday season, it is important to test the environment.
Understand what your website can handle and assess the store performance. Try with a load test, application performance monitoring, evaluating the site’s infrastructure and strategy.
- Don’t test during the holiday season. It might seem to be a fantastic idea but there are so many traffic spikes that the data is skewed.
- Don’t try A/B testing at all costs during the holiday seasons. The data won’t reflect the real numbers since people have different approaches those days.
A Quick Checklist
Make sure Your Website is loading in 3 seconds
Other than tools ensure you have the best hosting provider to handle the rush to your website. Contact us and get a 30-min FREE consultation from our experts on how to optimize your site.
Use Tools
There are so many free tools available to check your website speed and performance.
Try your hands on a few to make the user experience better.
Secure your website
Customer security is your job. Therefore, go for SSL and assure your customers that their data is protected with you. Use WAF and have secure web hosting.
Migrate if necessary
Use a better and robust platform like Managed WooCommerce and Magento hosting for a user-friendly experience.
Final Words
Having a fast and secure website is always necessary. But when it comes to holidays, you expect lots of new consumers.
They will be interacting with the website for the first time, and you should be impressing them.
In this article, I shared few tips to optimize your eCommerce store during holidays.
Got more tips? Please share them in the comment box. 🙂
