5 Considerations for Preparing Your

Ecommerce Site for the Holiday

Shopping Season

Is your site absolutely ready to accommodate high volume traffic surges

while maintaining speed and ensuring site availability?

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This 5 item checklist will help prepare your site for the

holiday shopping season

1. Review Past Web Performance Levels

2. Monitor Site Response Times and Speed

3. Run Load Tests

4. Secure your Site

5. Mobile Optimization

Review past web

performance

levels.

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Ask yourself the following questions:

• Has your site

experienced spikes and

prevailed?

• Has your site crashed

before?

Note: Take a deep look into what impacts your ecommerce site experience

and what could be causing lags and delayed transactions.

A sales-tax calculator on Bestbuy.com caused

a one hour delay for Reward Zone loyalty-club

members, who were given early access to ‘Black

Friday’ specials.

At the time, Best Buy had 40 million people in its

Reward Zone Loyalty program.

- Source: BizJournals

In the past we’ve learned…

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In 2011, Target experienced site crashes in the weeks leading up to the holiday season when an influx of shoppers went online to scoop up a new line of high-end clothing and home accessories.

- Source: ComputerWorld

In the past we’ve learned…

It crashed again six weeks

later!

Monitor site

response times

and speed.

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Ask yourself the following questions:

• How fast does your site respond

and load?

• Does it lag significantly when

accessed from different

geographical regions?

• If you sell internationally, how fast

does it load in Europe? China?

Russia?

HP desktop performance reportedly took a

hit during Cyber Monday last year –

increasing load time by 30%

The problems on the site occurred during

“Search” and with the “Add to Cart”

functions; two critical points to transactional

success.

- Source: Data Center Knowledge

• Test your website’s speed and see how quickly it

responds in a given location, both nearby and far away

from your servers.

• Keep an eye on site response times all the way up to,

and through, your holiday promotions.

• Don’t be afraid to initiate several test transactions to

get an idea on what

adjustments may need to be made to

improve load time and responsiveness.

Run load tests.

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• A load test examines the basic metrics about your

site (you could try this one by Media4X, but there

are several good ones out there).

• Load tests provide data on the total number of

page elements, size of files required to download

the page, a rundown of site images, status of HTML

and CSS code, and more.

What is a load test?

Secure your

Site.

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A Target data breach put the information of an

estimated 70 million shoppers as risk last year, pushing the company to cut its fourth-quarter earnings forecast and as they

expected sales to decline by 2.5 percent.

- Source: Washington Post

Case in point…

Optimize for

mobile.

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Mobile sites that offer a friendly user

experience will likely reap monetary benefits

as ecommerce sales rose 20 percent on

Thanksgiving 2013 compared with 2012, with

traffic from mobile devices accounted for 43

percent of all online traffic.

- Source: Yahoo Finance

Need to know…

With all this information at your disposal, you

have the power to optimize your site’s

performance for the heavy traffic to

come…And of course, you could always

employ a content delivery network (CDN) to

help your content flow steadily to and from

your end-users.

What Now?

Get Started…

• Head over to CDNetworks.com

• Our mission is to transform the Internet into a

secure, reliable, scalable and high performing

Application Delivery Network. CDNetworks’ unique

position as the only multinational CDN with

expertise and infrastructure in China, Russia and

other emerging markets, enables us to be trusted

partners in local markets, while serving as foremost

experts on extending into global markets.