Black Friday and Cyber Monday are Right Around the Corner: How Will You Avoid Downtime?

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday being right around the corner, chances are that you have ramped up your site's capabilities to handle the anticipated influx of traffic and sales. This is the one time of year your business can rake in the sales and your customers expect your site to be accessible and performing. If your site goes down during these vital shopping days, that downtime can spiral into lost sales, lost reputation, and a loss of repeat customers. What can you do to make sure your site stays up and running this holiday season?

Make Sure Your Site Has Enough Bandwidth

The days of the sales are not the days to discover your site does not have enough bandwidth, and goes down because of it. If you are on a shared hosting plan and that plan is unlimited, you may want to consider moving to a server where resources are evenly divided or even consider a move to a dedicated server. Otherwise that "unlimited" shared hosting plan may actually cause downtime as multiple sites on the server experience a huge influx in traffic.

Keep an Eye on Your Site's Performance

You want to make sure your site is performing up to par. Page load times of more than 3 seconds can and will cost you sales. In addition, a reduction in the performance of your site can be a foretelling of imminent downtime. If performance issues arise, get to the root of the problem sooner rather than later and keep your site performing above the bar at all times.

Utilize Website Monitoring Service

At Alertra we consistently discuss the value of quality website monitoring, but it is perhaps more crucial at this time of year than any other. You want to know if something is going awry with your site the moment it happens, and the only thing that can ensure that you will know promptly is the utilization of a quality website monitor. If you don't have website monitoring service in place, navigating the holiday sales season is somewhat akin to navigating a ship through rough waters under a cloudy sky in the dark, and without a compass. You won't know something is headed your way until you hit it, and with ecommerce, that means a total outage of your site.

By ensuring you have proper hosting in place and that you are monitoring your sites performance with a quality website monitoring service, you can be sure you get your piece of the holiday sales pie and that your business thrives with it.