How to Avoid Website Crashes During Holidays
In recent years, the holiday season has transformed from a time of shopping mall visits to a cyber spectacle, with millions of Americans taking advantage of exclusive online deals from a variety of retailers. Thus, the holiday season delivers an excellent opportunity for attracting new customers, reviving the interest of old customers and garnering all around improvements in profit margin. Although the ensuing increases in application traffic can greatly enhance profits, it can also create significant risks for sites not built to handle a sudden influx of visitors.
A sound eCommerce strategy is important all year long, but it becomes particularly essential when the holiday shopping rush arrives. A slow application is the equivalent of a dirty and unorganized department store — it will immediately drive away otherwise enthusiastic consumers. Even worse, however, is the the potential for app crashes and the potential for the accompanying loss of data. Prevent such a catastrophe and avoid website crashes during holidays by pursuing the following preventative measures.
3 Tips to Avoid Website Crashes During Holidays
Go Beyond the Content Delivery Network
There is no need to choose between rich content and efficient websites — both are possible with automated application performance optimization. Under this approach, content is not only continuously cached across secure servers (as with a CDN) but also dynamically optimized on the fly. This ensures faster load times and, ultimately, satisfied customers.
Invest In A Load Balancer
The even distribution of traffic becomes increasingly essential as the holiday rush approaches. A load balancer can ease the burden by distributing an increasing traffic load across multiple networks. This approach is particularly useful for addressing the worst case holiday traffic scenario: a failed web server.
If, despite a eCommerce site’s best efforts, a server happens to fail, a load balancer can ensure that the traffic is redistributed across the remainder of the servers. Even if all servers remain functional, a load balancer can improve overall performance by routing each website visitor to the most appropriate server. This will increase the speed of content delivery, thereby improving the consumer’s overall online shopping experience.
Utilize A Flexible Hosting Plan
Scalability becomes increasingly important during the holiday season, with otherwise steady traffic levels suddenly becoming skyrocketing. Although increases in server capacity are a direct route to handling traffic, they can also prove prohibitively expensive. For companies worried about the potential financial burdens associated with increased server space, the ideal solution may be a cloud-based, flexible hosting plan, which can be temporarily scaled up during the holiday before returning to a smaller and more stable traffic load in January.
Holiday traffic can be mixed blessing, for, while shoppers are eager to take advantage of online details, they have absolutely no patience for website delays. This holiday season, keep your customers happy by implementing a content delivery network, spreading the burden with a load balancer and backing up all valuable data. With sufficient preparation, vast increases in holiday traffic can transform from a nightmare into a dream come true.
Yottaa’s optimization solutions do all of the above and more by ensuring your application is scalable, secure and fast. Find out how to please your users and boost conversions by requesting a free trial.
Key Takeaways:
- Cache information for international shoppers with a content delivery network.
- Distribute traffic with a load balancer.
- Opt for a flexible hosting plan that can later be scaled back.
