The winter is on its way, and the cold weather usually rustles up a storm or two, but some of these storms occur online. With the Christmas sales fast approaching, online retailers are hurrying to prepare their websites for the millions of customers that will be trying to access them when the readily awaited sales finally open.
Is there really that much importance in preparing? What happens if a retailer weren’t to take nessassary precautions?
One word: CRASH
It’s happened to quite a few retailers recently, especially as online shopping is starting to become the number one way for customers to shop. Sites such as Amazon, Ticket master, H and M and Disney have all Crashed over the last year due to high traffic when releasing a new product.
There is clearly a trend. Some websites clearly cannot handle the high levels of footfall when it all comes at once!
Don’t worry, worried readers, there are solutions to these problems:
1) The first and most important is using a CDN (Content Delivery Network):
For faster load times, better video streaming and more efficient shopping cart processing, offload catalog images and other graphics to a content delivery network.
This service is available from cdnify, who have servers around the world that can upload images on a geographic basis from close-proximity nodes to shorten the travel distance and distribute the load to avoid slowdowns or bottlenecks during peak shopping hours.
2) Lighten your landing pages
Your home page and landing pages get the most hits and make the biggest impression on shoppers. As a result, they suck up the lion’s share of bandwidth. Studies show that 40% of users will abandon a web page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load, so these first-impression pages must load fast to keep shoppers’ attention. The goal is to make your landing pages as light as possible without losing traffic. Utilize compelling content that’s light on the graphics to grab customers’ interest, or your prospects will leave for greener shopping pastures. It’s a delicate balancing act, but one that can keep your website up and running during crunch times.
Get started with today with CDNify.