As another season of holiday deals for Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Boxing Day is upon us, you may want to spend some time thinking beyond your door crasher sales. Website performance is important all year round, but as shoppers head online, you need to know whether your site is equipped to handle what’s coming.
Just look at J. Crew, who last year experienced a website crash that experts estimate could have cost the company over $700,000 in sales; or Lowes, whose website downtime sent social media into a tailspin, and customers off to their competitors.
With one in ten dollars spent on retail in Canada flowing through digital channels in 2019*, every Ecommerce business should be thinking about how their website is performing, and have a plan to avoid the site fails, slowdowns and lockups that often happen at this time of year.
Remember that the increase in traffic during the holiday season won’t flow in steadily across the day; it’s far more likely to come in extreme spikes that exceed your normal levels of traffic.
If you haven’t started load testing for holiday traffic, we are here to help. Our PQA 5 Steps to Performance Testing Success will help you identify bottlenecks and get them fixed in time for the big day. Proper performance testing takes planning and scheduling, so it’s best to get started now.
Not only will performance testing keep your site running smoothly, it will also help you increase revenue and avoid the bad customer experiences that could send customers elsewhere. Proper performance testing can also identify both performance slowdowns – that may reduce order completion – and site freeze-ups that will definitely result in lost sales.
Often, performance testing issues can be fixed through reasonably easy infrastructure tuning. A properly planned performance test can also help you figure out where the performance issues are coming from, and help you determine where tuning may help.
Our PQA Testing 5 Steps to Performance Testing Success
Step 1. Work with your business and technical teams to understand key performance targets, including what loads must be planned for, and how the spikes will profile across the day
Step 2. Develop a simplified process map and workload model for the key navigation paths through your site
Step 3. Create automated scripts to simulate the holiday sales workload.
Step 4. Execute the tests incrementally increasing the workload while monitoring the infrastructure and user experience, and evaluating against the performance targets
Step 5. Make adjustments, retest, repeat until desired performance targets are reached.
Preparing for load spikes is crucial for ensuring Ecommerce success during this busy holiday season. Worried that you aren’t ready for the oncoming traffic? Reach out and we will help you understand how to protect your business and keep your customers happy this holiday season.
*According to Emarketer’s Canada Ecommerce Report 2019.