If your goal is to sell more on your e-commerce store, you can’t just assume that your website will be able to handle a sudden influx of visitors.
If you don’t prepare for increased traffic, you risk alienating new customers before they’ve made a purchase while also affecting existing customers who may look elsewhere for products or services. So how can you prepare your systems for more traffic?
Key Takeaways
- Upgrade your servers to handle more traffic from marketing campaigns. Use industrial SSDs to support many users without slowing down or crashing your site.
- Run tests on a small scale to see how your website performs with more visitors. This helps find and fix problems before real traffic increases.
- Optimize your website to improve user experience and search engine ranking. This also helps it handle more traffic when many people visit to make purchases.
- Protect sensitive customer data like credit cards and addresses with strong cybersecurity. Detect and stop data breaches and threats from hackers.
Upgrade Your Servers
You need servers that can handle the increased demand from an aggressive marketing campaign. Without it, your new customers will encounter 404 pages, likely driving them elsewhere. Investing in an industrial SSD to help your system handle increased traffic is vital as it provides enough support to manage the multiple users accessing your site from various locations without slowing the site down or causing a crash that could be more damaging than expected.
Run Tests
You won’t know whether your improvements will work unless you test. While you can’t test with a hundred people, you can still run smaller tests that give you a better idea about how your website will perform should traffic increase suddenly. These tests should help you identify potential problems and highlight areas to improve so you can feel more prepared for genuine traffic.
Optimize Your Website
Optimizing your website is essential for various reasons. It helps with SEO ranking and improves the customer experience. It will also help your website handle increased traffic when multiple visitors come to make a purchase. These optimization tips can help you improve your website and reduce the pressure it puts on your service. Reduce images to a usable size and remove anything that isn’t relevant or necessary anymore, but make sure you don’t make too many substantial changes, mages to the usable size, and remove anything that isn’t relevant or necessary anymore, but make sure you don’t make too many substantial changes as this could affect how your website looks.
Monitor Performance
Just because you’ve made changes doesn’t mean your website and systems will run perfectly. You still need to monitor performance to ensure things run as intended. Your IT team can check general performance and provide insights, especially during busier periods or seasons when more people are likely to visit your website. From there, you can use these insights to make further changes and help your website maintain its performance demands.
Protect the Website
As an e-commerce brand, you must find the best ways to secure your website and keep sensitive data and information from the wrong hands. Credit card information and addresses are two common targets for cybercriminals. Hence, you must protect your system with a robust cybersecurity setup to detect and prevent breaches or similar threats that could crash your website and steal crucial data.
High Traffic
High traffic should be a good thing. This means that people are visiting your website and are interested in your products. However, you don’t want high traffic to disrupt the system and crash your website. These tips will ensure your servers can handle increased traffic to ensure they have the best experience so you can reap the benefits.
Essential Industry Insights for Further Reading
- Ecommerce Website Security: Major Cyber Security Threats + Compliance: Learn about the biggest cyber security risks for online stores and how to protect your business and customers.
- PageSpeed Insights: Use this free tool from Google to test your ecommerce site speed and get tips to make pages load faster on all devices.
- 10 cyber security tips to protect your business online: Get practical advice from the UK National Cyber Security Centre on keeping your online business safe from threats.