Is Your Website Ready for Cyber Monday?

As eCommerce continues to claim an ever-increasing share of the consumer market, retailers are focusing more of their sales and advertising efforts online – especially during the holidays. Last year, online sales jumped 17 percent on Cyber Monday, according to comScore, Inc., and sales are expected to continue to set new records in 2013.

Is your website ready for Cyber Monday? First, it’s a good idea to conduct a load test of your site to determine whether or not it can handle the influx of traffic that it will receive during the holiday season (a web search will turn up plenty of companies that can do this for you but one we like is www.loadimpact.com). If you find that your website doesn’t have the capacity to handle a surge in traffic, it could easily crash, causing you to miss out on valuable business. Upgrading to a cloud server will provide additional resources to support Cyber Monday traffic. The elastic scale of the cloud allows for unpredictable spikes in traffic, providing the flexibility you need to guarantee your site is always up and running.

In addition to testing your website’s traffic capacity, it’s important to make sure your site is functioning properly. Test every element to ensure all key features are working as intended, including shopping carts, product search, log in, etc. It’s also beneficial to implement a third party monitoring solution to notify you if your website has availability issues. Finally, be prepared for the unexpected by creating a backup plan and ensuring you have automated backups in place.

Applied Innovations provides a variety of web hosting services, including cloud hosting, dedicated hosting, hybrid hosting solutions and more. Take advantage of what is guaranteed to be the biggest Cyber Monday yet – contact Applied today to learn more at 1-866-706-8691 or email us at sales@appliedi.net.