The holidays are in full swing and it is critical your company’s web applications are running smoothly. Creating a consistent and positive user experience is essential to engage with customers  and increase conversions, especially during this busy time of the year.
So, do you think your holiday strategy is winning over customers or are you falling short? Let’s find out how well you prepared.

1. Is Security a Problem?

Do the terms Heartbleed and Poodle keep you up at night? Yes, these names sound innocuous, however Heartbleed and Poodle are troubling web security exploits. IT managers should be very aware of the dangers that security exploits can cause and actively guard against them. Having a good handle on application security goes a long way to ensure customers engage the site in the manner you intended.

2. Can You Effectively Manage Application Traffic & Bots?

• Prioritize visitor traffic: Holiday shoppers can cause a spike in traffic to your application and even lead to a crash. Make sure you have rules in place to handle visitor traffic to your site. Any downtime from an outage will lead to tremendous revenue loss.
• Block unwanted visitors: Not all visitors are desired. It’s important to bar unwanted visitors from your site.
• Throttle bots and crawlers: Malicious bots and malware can affect your application and endanger the interests of your users. Bots also skew analytics and spoil valuable data.

3. Can You Monitor Application Performance?

Visitors who cannot reach your application or experience long load times will inevitably feel frustration. How can you work to keep an eye on your site that runs 24×7, 365 days a year? Monitoring helps identify performance issues and bottlenecks that threaten application conversion rates. Takes steps to ensure you:

• Have visibility into your application: understand and report on key metrics, like conversion rates and time-to-interact
• Test by device, browser, location and connectivity: do you monitor and tests the many different configurations that affect access to your site?
• Investigate Assets: do you know which page assets are loaded, in what sequence, and how that affects your site?

4. Are You Ready For The Upgrades?

Every year, new software and hardware releases affect the way we access web applications. For example, Apple’s new iPhone 6 series and iPad Air 2. Make sure your assets to take advantage of the new technology releases during the holiday season. Every user of your application has a unique context and it is important to optimize for different situations. Be sure that your application accounts for:

• Screen Size & Device – optimizing what they see on their particular device
• Mobile OS – ready for IOS 8, Android 5, Windows 10
• Browsers – Chrome, Safari, IE, Firefox, Opera, Silk
• Location – Where is your user? What type of network are they on?

5. Do You Use 3rd Party Widgets?

Social media is essential for engaging customers with your company’s application. If these widgets are not handled properly, they can end up hurting the user experience rather than enriching it. What can you do to make sure these intended widgets serve their purpose?

• Flash: Are you using technology that works across all user platforms and devices?
• Social Media Widgets: Are widgets, like Facebook plugins, affecting load times?
• Site Certification Assets: How important is the load sequence to your performance?
• Live Chat: How do you handle live support?

6. Do You Have A Maintenance Page?

There are many factors that can affect customer ability to connect to your site. In the unlikely event that your site is not reachable or goes into maintenance, you still have to maintain a professional web presence on your site. Customers are expecting a message to know that you are still active. Positive communication with your customers help retain them in the long run and this is a must. Prepare to have:

• Maintenance Pages: do you have pages for site maintenance or outage?
• Maintenance Deployment: do you have deployment process in place for the outage/maintenance issues?

Do You Need Holiday Help?

If maximizing user engagement and increasing conversion rates on your applications are on your wish list this holiday season, look no further. Yottaa works with customers, like Fathead, to improve performance, increase visitor engagement and maximize application uptime. We can address issues including security, monitoring, upgrades, and maintenance. Yottaa accomplishes all this without any code changes and many of our customers are up and running in a week. Remember, happy customers provide the gift that keeps on giving – referrals!