5 Ways To Deal With Heavy Traffic In Your eCommerce Stores

This article will talk about the imperative ways to prep up eCommerce stores in the holiday season to help them deal with traffic surges.

While December is the month of festivities, it is believed that every eCommerce companies indulge with great promotions, viral campaigns and so on to bring on great traffic to the site for enormous sales. Most times they do not realise the repercussions of driving such impactful campaigns and fail to prepare their sites for it an incessant flow of traffic during the holidays. From faster load time to seamless checkout, your eCommerce site has to take care of everything to ensure that every visitor has the best shopping experience ever.

To help your eCommerce site prep up for high traffic surges during the holidays or festive season, here are some quick steps to follow at the earliest.

Knowing well the visitors’ expectations

While everyone shopping online buyers are in hurry, you need to prepare your site to load with the maximum speed. Sites with higher loading speed lose a quarter of visitors on an average. Users expect a site to load in 3 seconds or less, and with delay by even one second, you can lose conversions by 7-10%. So, the basic step is to optimise the speed of your site.

Revise the hosting plan

Shared hosting does not work well for a bigger site or that deals with a huge amount of traffic. Tactfully, it is time during the holiday season sale for revising your hosting plan and choose a dedicated server hosting or a VPS (Virtual private server) that offers the bandwidth to deal with enormous traffic.

Work on content delivery

Before the peak sales hit your site, optimise the content delivery with an appropriate CDN (Content Delivery Network) for sharing it with all local visitors. It caches the static files of the eCommerce site across the separate servers and eventually distributes them to the visitors in various regions from the nearest server. This eliminates the lag time in loading a site and retain visitors.

Streamline the website

Overhaul different aspect of your site as much possible.  For every page’s element, there’s an HTTP request sent to the server from the browser. So, the web pages that contain too many scripts, images or multimedia elements will slow down if they are not redesigned or modified in an optimised way.

Caching

Apart from using a CDN, another great way to assure flawless performance of a site with high traffic is caching the static assets. Static content is those which are uniform across the time and need not be requested repeatedly. Thus, caching up these content will deliberately decrease the number of requests between the web browser and the server.

With Christmas spirit already set forth and New year celebrations approaching fast, waste no more time to overhaul your website.  Get these proven tricks to make your website the most competent eCommerce site to deal with super sales and an unending number of visitors.

Jonathan Paul is an expert OpenCart developer in Australia who works for more than 7 years at PHPProgrammers, one of the time-worn, visionary firms offering A-one websites and eCommerce solutions using the latest technologies. An avid techie and writer, he likes to pen down tips and tricks to improve eCommerce performance for online businesses.