Is your website ready for Black Friday 2016? One of the biggest retail days of the year is now looming large, so it is probably too late in the day for sweeping changes to your infrastructure. But there might still be time to make some late changes to give your e-commerce site the best possible chance of coping with any extra demand generated by Black Friday traffic.
Let’s explore some of the options at this late stage.
If you’re not currently using a content delivery network (CDN), there might still be time for your IT guys or your web host to set one up before Black Friday. The CDN will serve all of the static aspects of your website, including images and graphics, to take the strain of your main server. This will free up your server’s resources to cope with additional traffic that is attracted by your Black Friday deals.
Which products will be on offer in your Black Friday deals? How will you be marketing those deals? It is not too late to let your web host know what you have got planned. This will give them the possible chance of configuring your hosting setup to cope with traffic surges. They might also be able to put in place a plan to keep key pages available, even if the website as a whole starts to creak under the pressure.
Similarly to a CDN, a cache is a very useful and relatively simple way of ensuring your pages load more efficiently and while using fewer resources. Caching creates ‘light’ versions of your content that can be served quickly to as many customers as required once the page has been cached. We use tools such as NGinx and Varnish to create content caches and improve front-end performance of the websites we host.
Find out how you can use Black Friday to prepare for future traffic surges on your website.
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