Four e-commerce tips for getting ready for the holidays

The shopping season has started again, and while customers are preparing their tablets, phones and laptops for online purchases, retailers should work hard to ensure easy dealing with upcoming traffic spikes. Is your e-commerce site ready for the crazy heavy shopping hours? Here are a few valuable tips for you.
Four e-commerce tips for getting ready for the holidays

The shopping season has started again, and while customers are preparing their tablets, phones and laptops for online purchases, retailers should work hard to ensure easy dealing with upcoming traffic spikes. Is your e-commerce site ready for the crazy heavy shopping hours? Here are a few valuable tips for you.

Optimize Hosting Infrastructure

One reason why shopping card is abandoned is slow work of a website. Visitors expect it to load within milliseconds, and if their expectations are not answered, they are likely to give up and open the sites where performance is way better. There is a worse case – web-site that has broken down. Luckily, there are several ways to boost web-site performance and prepare for handing the surge of traffic in the course of the Holiday shopping season.

1. Dedicated hosting allows having a large amount of resources at your disposal and scale up before traffic surge and down when the Holiday season is over.

2. Content delivery networks boost the speed of site by placing content closer to your visitors from all the globe. CDN edge servers pull and cache content from the origin server and distribute it. As the result, you see better throughput, decrease site loading time and have more customers.

3. Load balancers prevent downtime when some of servers fail, distributing traffic across the servers that function.

Secure Your Sites

Customers’ trust means a lot, and you don’t want to spoil it, right? One of the main conditions of successful shopping season is making sure that your web-site is secure, and customer’s financial data is safe. If customers don’t feel safe on your web-site, they will just go away. Here’s what you will need:

1. SSL Certificates provide strong encryption and protect all sensitive data on your web-site. Today, this is the standard of online safety due to which customers may enter their private data without fear.

2. PCI Compliance (compliance with the Payment Card Industry’s Data Security Standards) renders certificates for your organization and makes sure you have completed all necessary steps for protecting your customers’ data.

3. Firewalls protect web-sites from DDoS attacks, viruses, malware and other malicious Internet traffic. They scan server’s activity and define threats with the help of signature-based intrusion prevention without decreasing the speed of your traffic.

Back up. Always.

You can hope to avoid site breakdown, but backups are critical during the Holiday shopping season. In case of disaster, you will know that the database of users’ information is safe and can be restored in a matter for a few minutes.

Have a Reliable Support Team

It’s hard to be prepared for everything. And if downtime takes place, your support team should react quickly. Onsite 24/7 monitoring of your web-site performance will help you to know how the site deals with traffic spikes, and whether more resources are required.

The Holiday shopping season may be a real challenge, but not if you are ready for it. These tips will help you to prepare the web-site for traffic spikes during the weeks of high sales.  And don’t forget that INXYHOST team is always ready to provide customers with reliable and efficient support!

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