Holiday season, Black Friday and Cyber Monday
It is getting colder outside and the holiday shopping season, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are all looming. Is your Magento site ready for the uplift in traffic and special holidays promotions everyone is waiting for?
Black Friday 2015 will be held on Friday 27 November 2015, although consumers can expect to see deals during the week leading up to Black Friday, the weekend following it, and Cyber Monday – 30 November 2015. Last year Amazon began its Black Friday deals earlier than ever, a full week before Black Friday, and we won’t be surprised to see the same again in 2015, if not earlier.
There is one thing that most website owners often forget and this is the increased holiday traffic. Usually, the holiday season with all the special holiday discounts and the sales days are a recipe for significant spikes in the incoming traffic that can lead to your website being unresponsive and getting bogged down quite easily. This can lead to missed sales opportunities and we are sure that this is something you do not want to happen.
Here are some of the best practices to prepare your Magento site for the expected high website traffic:
Optimise your site
There are multiple ways to optimise a website. Some of them are easy just as removing any unneeded modules and content from your Magento site that can result in increased loading time while others require some specific actions such as clearing the MySQL database from old logs and temporary data. In case you are not experienced with such techniques we would strongly recommend you to contact your developer for assistance with this. Do not forget to backup your website before performing any of the above changes.
We can also provide a Magento MOT to make sure things are running as fast as they can be.
For the past 3 years we have partnered with one of the best Content Delivery Network providers – Cloudflare CDN. This partnership provides all our shared customers with the ability to activate the CDN features improving both the performance and security of their website at no additional cost.
A CDN service caches the content of your website to multiple servers around the world. When a customer from another country tries to access your website, instead of being connected to the original server, where your website is hosted, they will be automatically connected to the nearest server possible from the CDN network.
Bringing your website closer to your visitors using the CloudFlare CDN will not only increase the overall loading speed of your website but will also improve and handle the incoming traffic. The paid for plans are also a great tool to help mitigate DDOS attacks
Make sure you have enough bandwidth
Shared customers can now easily upgrade your bandwidth in an instant to avoid any downtime as documented here. You will only need to pay for what you need in the month also, so the bandwidth costs decreases as the months goes on. Remember that bandwidth is reset on the 1st of every month.
Dedicated customers are all allowed to burst, we do not limit ports like most providers do. You will just be billed for overages in the next month.
Are you on the right plan?
We have two types of shared hosting, both with low contention. If you are on a standard share then consider upgrading to an ssd shared Magento plan these plans only have a maximum of 8 accounts per server and you will get more power. For bigger spikes in traffic then consider a dedicated SSD server. We offer a free migration service for any upgrades and have an excellent stock of brand new Dell Poweredge models ready for quick installs.
We can easily add extra servers to dedicated server customers plans to cope with the extra load, please contact us for more information.
Is your Magento install secure?
With the arrival of recent patches from magento ensure you have all of these latest patches applied (contact us if you need us to help you with this).
Our team are always ready to help with your continued online success!