Tips to manage Ecommerce website during holiday season

Since the advent of ecommerce, the retail industry has experienced tremendous development as more and more consumers opt to purchase online. This is because it is convenient to acquire goods or services, there are many options, online payments are easy, and most importantly, the marketplaces provide alluring discounts.

But, as the level of convenience rises, so make the demands. Customers value speed, so whether you prepare for ecommerce software development or update an existing storefront, keep in mind that online purchasing should be simple, quick, and efficient. No matter how well you market your products, if your online store's platform doesn't function properly, you won't be able to make a sale. Bugs, a slow website, confusing shopping cart navigation, and other mistakes can make potential customers decide against purchasing.

Remember that returning customers are always satisfied customers. Your main objective should be to take advantage of the traffic spike, especially before the busy holiday season. Saying that is easier than executing it; nevertheless, to manage or control such volume surges on an ecommerce website, you must plan far in advance.

How to Control Ecommerce Website Traffic During the Busiest Times

Step 1: Ensure that Your Website is Up at all Times

During the festive season, downtime could cause your organization to suffer severe losses. Even if you have executed everything correctly—stocking up, advertising, etc.—the goal would still be unsuccessful if your website is unavailable.

How to Address This:

Contact your hosting company well in advance to learn about the restrictions associated with your hosting option and to make preparations. You can install several tools to track your website's uptime rating. According to surveys, the leading ecommerce websites maintained a 99.9% uptime rating despite seasonal traffic spikes.

Step 2: Ensure Fast Page Loading

Any time your website takes longer than 2 seconds to load, more than 40% of your potential customers will leave. The user experience can be improved by increasing the website loading speed, which is vital for SEO rankings. Speed sells, in other words.

How to Address This:

Use free internet resources like WP Checkup, Google PageSpeed Insights, or GTmetrix. They can advise you on what needs to be improved. For instance, you could minify CSS/HTML/JavaScript, prioritize visible information, enable encryption, enhance server response time, or optimize photos.

Step 3: Strengthen Security to Offer the Customer Confidence

The holiday season is known for its increased consumption. Customers are aware that hackers and ecommerce owners are both aware of this. So, make sure to practice cybersecurity. Are you knowledgeable about GDPR? Data protection for customers? Are the payment options sufficiently secure?

How to Address This:

There are various ways to protect your website. All administrators must use the 2-Step authentication method or 2FA. Antivirus software and a firewall must be installed on the server. Ensure that an SSL certificate is a setup as well. For ecommerce websites, this is a requirement as it allows for the safekeeping of sensitive user data, including credit card numbers and personal data.

Step 4: Utilize the CDN

More people could shop and access services online because of increased internet adoption. In connection with this, faster internet speeds have made accessing complicated, multimedia-rich websites commonplace. To make matters worse, consumers now have higher expectations as they seek out services quickly and whenever they please.

How to Address This:

A geographically dispersed group of servers known as a content delivery network (CDN) collaborates to deliver Internet material quickly. In other words, a CDN creates static copies of the website's content and archives them on remote servers.

Every time a user accesses the website, the data is retrieved from the closest location, providing lightning-fast access to the data. Additionally, eliminating repetitive HTTP queries to the server prevents it from becoming overloaded. Since attackers won't be able to look up your original IP address, CDN also acts as the first layer of defense from cyberattacks and DDoS. There are many CDNs on the market, including Cloudflare, Key CDN, and others.

Step 5: Improve the Website's Digital App

Considering how many individuals are using their mobile phones to access the internet. For an ecommerce website, having a mobile-friendly website may not be sufficient.

How to Address This:

Developing an app for many platforms would be a great way to control the holiday traffic spike. A user might not need to browse or zoom in extremely far to make a purchase seamlessly. Numerous tools may evaluate and offer information on how mobile-friendly a certain website is. For your ecommerce website, tools like Google's Search Console provide meaningful analytics.

Step 6: Prioritize Customer Service Improvement

The increase in traffic can require more work in your company's back office. Your clients would have a lot of questions.

How to Address This:

As unimportant as it may seem, a website's FAQ section can help users with many questions. A higher conversion rate would result if the website could answer their questions or dispel their fears. Also, dealing with many customers can be easier by offering live chats and prompt email responses to their questions.

Step 7: Make the Checkout Process Easier

Several checkout process-related problems, such as a difficult checkout, a lack of payment options, an inadequate shipping policy, etc., account for nearly 70% of empty cart rates. Additionally, adding too many pages makes your website bigger and takes longer to load.

How to Address This:

Reducing the procedure to a few simple steps is an excellent strategy. A clever quick-buy button placed adjacent to the item can save the customer time and prevent server overload. You could also put a progress bar at the top of the page to show users where they are during the checkout process, which will help make it less complicated for them.

Your checkout procedure must also be as clear and straightforward as possible to improve conversions. Here, simple is best, so consider only requesting pertinent information from your customers that will help your business.

Conclusion

As we can see, maximizing the seasonal spike in traffic to your ecommerce website could provide several difficulties. Therefore, waiting until the last minute to make big modifications may not be wise.