With Black Friday weekend coming up, ecommerce sites are preparing for a huge increase in traffic. If you haven’t made any changes yet, fear not, there’s still time! We’ve compiled a Black Friday last-minute checklist so you can prepare your site for the Black Friday weekend!
Availability
Monitor your uptime status.
Ometria reported the number of on-site visits from Black Friday to Cyber Monday in recent years was 150% higher than in an average 4-day period on sites. With a higher number of visitors expected to be on your site, it’s vital to know how much traffic volume your site can handle to avoid those 404’s. Running a simple Apache Bench load test can show how your site copes with an increased number of visitors.
Arguably, the most important feature of your site is making sure it is up! Be alerted to downtime with Uptime Monitoring. For Black Friday, make sure your tests are running often and from a location suitable for your average consumer.
If you do have concerns about your site’s ability to handle an increased load, a simple queue system should be implemented to give information to customers. Finally, if you do have problems with uptime, provide live data to clients using a Status Page.
Security
Protect your online reputation.
Cybercriminals are preparing for the holiday season. Most recently, Macy’s have fallen victim to a Magecart attack lasting over 1 week! There are some quick-wins to check on your website security. Firstly, ensure you have a Vulnerability Scan set up to avoid attacks in the first place, this will continuously monitor your site for security vulnerabilities.
Secondly, make sure your SSL certificate is valid and redirecting correctly, this will show customers your site is safe to shop on. Monitor your SSL certificate as a preventative method against Domain Hijacking and be alerted to any existing SSL weaknesses.
With an increase in visitors to your website, there’s an increased motive for cybercriminals to attack your site. Now more than ever, it is important to have Magecart Detection switched on to alert you to untrusted hosts. Set-up takes as little as 5 minutes to protect you from data loss, ICO fines, and reputational damage.
Performance
Improve your digital experience.
40% of customers will leave a site that doesn’t load in 3 seconds, is your site at risk of losing customers? Page Performance tests can give you precise result figures on your site page, including speed.
Increase site speed by compressing large images and videos to make them smaller, and remove any unnecessary third-party tools, or all non-essential third-parties entirely for the Black Friday weekend.
Finally, test your critical customer journeys with Synthetic User Journeys to make sure customers can shop without issues. For help visit the Knowledge Base or read our walk-through tutorials, such as ‘Add to Cart’.
All these tips can be applied last minute, so there’s still time to implement changes to improve your customer’s Black Friday experience!
For more tips and tricks see our blog: Preparing your site for Black Friday
