Get Your Site Ready for Cyber Monday Traffic

Cyber Monday is right around the corner. Is your site ready for the traffic it is about to receive? If your business is running Cyber Monday promotions, there are some steps you need to take to ensure that you don't miss out on making the biggest sales of the year.

What is Cyber Monday?

Prior to the advent of the Internet, people would wait until the Friday after Thanksgiving, known as Black Friday, to rush to the stores in the wee hours of the morning to take advantage of the Black Friday deals. While Black Friday is still a big deal, another retail shopping day has come to the forefront. This day is known as Cyber Monday. Cyber Monday is the Monday following Thanksgiving weekend and it is one of the biggest online shopping days of the year. If your site provides goods or services to the public, Cyber Monday is an opportunity to rake in the sales.

Getting Ready for Cyber Monday

If your site is going to participate in the Cyber Monday madness, you better make sure that you are prepared. This means determining your discount pricing, anticipating your required inventory, and trying to estimate sales expectations. However, no matter how carefully you plan your sale, if your site can't handle the traffic, you may miss out on the entire opportunity that this day has to present. In addition to preparing your site's Cyber Monday sale, you need to ensure that your site can handle the volume that it is about to receive. This may mean logging into your hosting plan to ensure that you have adequate bandwidth to handle the traffic. If you don't, you need to upgrade now to prepare for the Cyber Monday traffic. If you don't already have website monitoring in place, you will also want to utilize a quality monitoring service. If your site goes down or encounters performance issues during your Cyber Monday sale, you want to be sure that you know the minute the website downtime occurs. A quality monitoring service will notify you via email, SMS text message, and phone to ensure that you know the moment your site is encountering problems. Also make sure that you have a backup plan in place in case things do go south with your hosting provider. Contingency plans are always important, but you definitely want to make sure that you have a plan B if your site does go down on one of the biggest sales days of the year.