How can you best prevent your website from crashing during peak periods?
1st January 2018
Most recently we witnessed high profile retailers suffer website crashes during the Black Friday weekend. John Lewis and Argos were some of the big name victims of website crashes during this period. The previous year, Game, Curry’s and Tesco suffered website outages during the Black Friday weekend. This goes to show even the major retailers can suffer from websites going offline during peak periods, so what can be done to prevent it?
Firstly, there will never be a 100% guarantee that your website will remain up and running all of the time. From time to time there will be natural disasters, servers failing, cyber attacks and potentially, user error. However, customers are more online savvy than ever and if your website fails during peak periods, you will inevitably suffer from a loss of sales. Capacitas claims that John Lewis’s outage cost them £2.8 million and that £2.8 million has most likely gone to a competitor.
There are some key things that can be put in place to ensure your website is as stable as possible.
Be prepared. Set a schedule for testing and simulations well in advance of busy periods. You may need to employ a temporary team for testing and maintenance of your website during peak periods. Use load testing tools to simulate a sudden jump in incoming web traffic. By doing this it will enable you to identify any weak points in your website and tackle these before it harms customer experience. The testing and simulations should not be done as a one off but continuously to ensure your website is consistently at peak performance.
Bespoke coding. You may need to look at the coding and development of the website and make some customised changes to manage the sudden rise in traffic. As a website owner, you should anticipate every option and have a plan. For example, if a customer is shopping on your website and building up their basket and the website crashes, when they return, will their basket still contain all of their items? The technical team need to be briefed and ready to make coding changes leading up to and during said period to ensure consistent customer experience and also damage control, should anything go wrong.
Ensure you have a robust server. Contact your provider and ensure that you don’t have basic data caps in place with your website. Many website hosts impose general data caps that limit the capacity of data transfer to and from a website. Under heavy traffic periods this will be detrimental for your websites performance. Increasing your data cap may cost more up front however, it will ensure your website doesn't fail due to a data limitation.
Extend your on-line promotion period. Many retailers broke the mould this year during Black Friday and had offers online for most of the week leading up to the weekend. By doing this, you will curb some of the heavy traffic that would have hit your website over the weekend period. Use smart advertising to let customers know when your deals start and finish to ensure that they are aware.
Plan to fail. As previously mentioned, you cannot be 100% secure from your website having some outages. Due to this, you will need to ensure that your communication plan if you do experience outage is robust. Use popular channels such as Twitter to communicate with customers and let them know the current situation and when it is likely to be resolved. This could be a chance to offer a further promotion due to the failure, for example, if you tell customers they will receive 30% off now rather than 20% if they wait for you to come back online, you will have more chance of retaining that business.
