Maintaining uptime throughout the holiday season is essential for businesses who rely on their website to generate income. This is the most profitable time of year for e-commerce stores since they get a majority chunk of their yearly sales during this period. It is critical for these websites to ensure that clients have uninterrupted access to their products, particularly between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when greater sales are expected. Business owners need to keep their websites operational throughout this time period with no unforeseen downtime. Stay tuned to see why you need increased web resources during the 2021 holiday season.
Despite these efforts, things might go downhill for a variety of reasons, rendering the website inaccessible to visitors in a matter of seconds. It is the worst nightmare that site owners could imagine, as the impact of losses would be far more than on regular days. Therefore you need to be extra cautious when preparing your site for the holiday season. That is why you need increased web resources during the 2021 holiday season. Don’t cheap out on getting better servers or hiring technical experts as it is necessary for the smooth functioning of the website.
Why the festive season of 2021 will be a different?
Rather than door-busters in-store, the 2021 festive season will be dominated by online shopping. Due to a major shift in the buying patterns of consumers because of the pandemic, as well as the cold weather, people will be more reluctant to go into a store. The majority of people are still uncomfortable buying in-store and prefer to spend their money online.
According to some projections, this year’s e-commerce sales may increase by up to 35%. Retailers are expanding their digital footprints to satisfy demand by improving their applications and online shopping experiences. Brands with excellent online services, such as seamless mobile browsing, straightforward payment methods, chatbots, and accurate tailored suggestions, will emerge victorious.
Increased traffic to your site
The holidays account for around 30% of annual revenues for a sizable number of online retailers. Along with the enormous increase in sales, a stampede of Christmas consumers occurs. This implies that eCommerce business owners must ensure their sites are prepared to handle the increased visitor traffic. To avert a festive disaster, e-commerce site owners should double-check that their servers are capable of handling the anticipated surge in traffic (based on the data analysis). If you have any doubts about your site’s ability to handle the traffic spike, contact your hosting provider to confirm the capabilities and explore realistic solutions for handling the increase in traffic.
Acquiring more server capacity is one method to resolve a possible traffic problem. This is what I mean by “increased web resources during the 2021 Holiday Season”. If this is not possible, you may consider utilizing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to handle the surge in traffic. A CDN operates by caching static material such as image files, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript over a network of geographically distributed servers in order to provide content to consumers more quickly. This is a particularly important e-commerce advice over the holidays, given that all stores face some amount of danger and server load during the chaos.
Make sure your website loads quickly
The majority of online customers (almost half) will quit a page that takes longer than 2 seconds to load. In case of holidays, such a high desertion rate would be disastrous.
In order to guarantee that your website loads as rapidly as possible, consider the following:
- Third-party snippets that use resources from another domain take up important loading time and cause a delay in the overall loading time. If you have any scripts on your website that were installed by a provider that you are no longer utilizing, you should delete them immediately. In order to do this, consult with your IT staff about removing them from your website’s content.
- One of the most successful methods of reducing load time is through the use of a system known as “caching.” Caching is the process of storing prepared copies of your website’s files in a quickly accessible location on your server known as its Random Access Memory (RAM). Every time a customer visits your website, your server will save time by not having to retrieve all of the necessary material from your database, compile it into an HTML file, and send it to the visitor’s browser to display. Instead, it will simply send the cached file to the visitor’s browser, which will then display it.
However, while there are more complicated and long-term improvements you can do to enhance the performance of your website and you should consider them as it is a good step even for the off season. Speed is an important ranking factor and you must take care of it if you want higher search engine rankings.
Ensure that your web server is ready
Don’t let your server crash during the festive season. It will cost you thousands of dollars. Consider upgrading your servers since there will be huge traffic spikes. Also, invest in the security of your server and use Cloudflare or other such security service to mitigate any kind of DDOS attack. It is extremely easy to do this attack during the festive season because your server will already be overwhelmed by visitors. Many cybercriminals wait for this specific time of the year to unleash their payload. These attacks not only crashes your server but can also lead to exposing critical information that could pave their way into your server. Once they get access to your server they can do all kinds of nasty stuff including using your server for their botnets.
The Holidays do bring an opportunity for the online stores but you can only get the most of out it by preparing in advance. You have to take care of every aspect of costumer’s experience such that they become your regular customers even after the season. In this article, I have shown you why you need increased web resources for the 2021 holiday season. To make sure your website will be in tip top shape for the upcoming holiday season, stay tuned to out blog! If you would like some experts to take a look just to make sure everything is working, get in contact with Fitzgerald Tech Solutions today!
