Member Article

Preparing your website for a rush

It’s the moment every retailer dreams of – a mention in the national media perhaps, or a sudden craze for your product, and suddenly everyone’s googling your name and crowding onto your website. A surge in website traffic is an easy problem to ignore – if the site runs perfectly well under a normal load throughout the year, most assume it will be just fine. But retailers can’t afford to let excitement stop them paying attention to the basic functioning of their website.

Website downtime, slow loading pages and broken links can be the difference between a customer buying a gift from one retailer or moving on to another. Nothing tests website performance quite like a surge of traffic, which can create a nightmare for IT. And while lost sales are the most immediate problem, the damage done to your image with customers can haunt a retailer for years to come.

Here are three things an IT manager can do to prepare for an unexpected rush.

1. Uptime is money

If you’re experiencing a surge in interest, the most important metric is uptime. If the website isn’t up, nothing else really matters. IT needs to be sure that it has a monitoring system in place so that it is alerted to server outages, fluctuations in bandwidth usage, load balance and more. By focusing on availability from the customer’s point of view, IT puts itself in the best position to succeed.

2. User experience is critical

Once uptime is ensured, IT should focus on issues of performance, specifically in terms of what affects the user experience. From a technical perspective, the most important aspects of user experience are page speed and full page load times. Graphics and videos need to load instantly, they serve little purpose if customers leave the site without seeing them.

To ensure the best user experience, use ping requests and loading time measurements (the time it takes to download source code) to track page speed, and routinely measure full page load times in a browser. Additionally, test out shopping cart features such as logins and transactions to root out any possible problems. While sharp web design showcases your products or services in the best light, the more web details you have, the more places where something can go wrong. Content-rich sites are a must, but so are properly functioning ones.

3. The Nitty Gritty

If the first two tasks are taken care of, then your website should be ready to go. But, there is always room for improvement.

IT support staff with time on their hands should monitor for free disk space on servers, ensuring that they don’t fill up with log files, database entries and rich content uploads that can throttle CPU workloads and cause server failures. Little problems like this, which are both easy to account for and easy to forget about, can cause major problems.

Don’t let technology fail you just as your business is taking off. An effective Unified Monitoring solution can go a long way to ensuring your website stays up, your customers stay happy, and your business is rewarded.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Dirk Paessler .