Is Your Website Ready for the Cyber Monday Madness?

We’ve talked about how important it is for your site to be capable of handling traffic spikes and steadily-increasing website traffic. If your site is a retail site, this time of year the message couldn’t be more important. As millions of shoppers flood the Internet with traffic looking for the best deals to be had, the one question you must ask yourself is, can your site handle the traffic that will be coming on Cyber Monday?

What is Cyber Monday?

Cyber Monday is the time of year when shoppers everywhere clamor to see which sites have the best deals. It all started out with Black Friday – that time of year when shoppers wait outside of stores in the wee hours of the morning to get the “door buster” deals that so few actually manage to get their hands on. Black Friday has been around for a long time (named for the fact that this is the time of the year when most U.S. retailers begin operating in the black and not the red). The advent of the Internet, however, brought us a new version of Black Friday. Instead of putting the sales up the day after Thanksgiving, Cyber Monday is held the Monday after the holiday weekend – and buyers expect to see deep discounts and mad deals. If you’re a retail establishment, you already know this. Even GoDaddy is having their own Cyber Monday event, offering discounts on their already-low prices.

What Your Site Needs to Worry About

If your site offers products and/or services to the public, you need to worry about two things…

1. Is Your Site Going to Be Offering Those One-of-a-Kind Cyber Monday Deals; and

2. Can Your Site Handle the Traffic?

Don’t assume your site is ready to handle the Cyber Monday rush. Even sites like Amazon.com have had a hard time keeping up with the demand that Cyber Monday puts on their website.

How can you tell if your site is ready for the traffic it’s going to receive if you’re participating in the Cyber Monday phenomena? We talked about understanding your site’s traffic capabilities and making sure your site is ready for successs in past posts. If your site is offering Cyber Monday specials, now is the time to make sure your site can keep up with the traffic. It may be a good idea to revisit these posts and see if your site is truly ready for the madness of Cyber Monday. After all, you don’t want to suffer website downtime as a result of too much traffic, losing out on the most profitable day of the year!

Don’t Let Customers Knock Down Your Doors

In the brick-and-mortar world, customers have actually broken down store doors to get in on the Black Friday action. It would seem that the Cyber Monday equivalent of this would be to bring a site down due to too much traffic. Don’t let this happen to your site. Prepare and be ready and do what you must do to avoid Cyber Monday website downtime.