As we approach the fast-approaching Black Friday, Cyber Monday (BFCM), and Christmas season, it’s crucial to ensure that your website is prepared. Performance and scalability are key factors to keep in mind. Ensure that your website can effectively handle the anticipated traffic to avoid downtime during the busiest time of the year. While re-platforming to something more scalable might not be feasible, there are quick wins for your existing website, which we will focus on.
Firstly, it’s crucial to stress test your current systems. Use robust tools that mimic browser usage and identify breaking points and bottlenecks. Don’t stress test just your homepage, but also your most popular categories and products, along with the cart and checkout. Since queries to your database or third-party APIs are typically the bottleneck, caching whatever you can is a must. You may choose to cache data on the filesystem or in a key-value store like Redis.
Third-party scripts play an essential role in tracking analytics, ad spend, and conversions for e-commerce sites. However, too many third-party scripts can negatively impact your end-user’s experience, resulting in slow loading times, and a lower potential for revenue. Implement solutions such as Cloudflare, which sits between your website and the internet and offloads third-party scripts to its ‘edge network,’ speeding everything up.
User experience, conversion rate optimisation, and security and trustworthiness are also crucial factors to consider. Navigation, mobile optimisation, and checkout optimisation are three areas most likely to have an impact. We recommend prioritising proper data security and protection, ensuring that you’re covered regarding levels of Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance, and practice good infosec to reduce the possibility of security breaches.
Trust signals are a powerful way to instil confidence in your visitors. Show off PCI DSS compliance badges and trusted payment gateways to encourage visitors to trust your website. Collecting data throughout the holiday season is crucial, and there are tools available for this, such as Google Analytics 4 (GA4), or a question on the checkout asking: “How did you hear about us?” Lastly, make sure to start implementing these measures as soon as possible to stay ahead of the competition.
