Every holiday season, there are reports of major eCommerce sites slowing down — or going down — when the masses come online to take advantage of sales.  These sites suffer from bad PR and lost revenue when frustrated shoppers can’t access their sites or complete a checkout. On the list of “eCommerce Nightmares,” a crash on black friday/cyber monday is number one.

Site owners know they need to make extensive preparations to avoid this fate, but how to do so is a different story.  Do you load test? Upgrade servers? Use a CDN?  There are literally thousands of solutions that solve the dozens of problems a site can encounter when scaling up its eCommerce shop. It’s a lot to wade through, especially with a fixed deadline staring you down. You can’t just move your big sale back a month if your site isn’t ready at the eleventh hour.

Our newest infographic features a list covering most important steps in preparing for the holidays. It includes an extended list for complete preparation, as well as a last-minute list for the truly desperate. Click here to view the PDF version of the infographic with embedded links.

Here are links to the resources that appear above (Click here to view a PDF version of the infographic that includes links):

• 17 User Experience Metrics You Should Care About [eBook]
• 9 Tips for Benchmarking Web Performance [eBook]
• Managing A Web Performance Optimization Project [eBook]
• High Performance Web Sites by Steve Souders [Book]

Tweet:

Holiday Survival Tip for eCommerce: Monitor your social widgets! A bad script can take down your site. Tweet This!

Holiday Survival Tip for eCommerce: monitor end-user experience in real time — see what shoppers see! Tweet This!

Holiday Survival Tip for eCommerce: Plan 10x capacity – Surprise traffic is great! Crashing is not. Tweet This!