Magento Sites – A Must-Do List To Prepare For Black Friday

How much revenue will you lose this holiday season if your Magento site goes down because of too much visitor traffic?  Prevent this by following our Magento Hosting Checklist.

 

“75 percent of all smartphone and tablet users said they would abandon a retailer’s mobile site or app if it was buggy, slow or prone to crashes.”

– CNBC Poll

Black Friday is coming fast.  With many shoppers streaming to your store, more than just your products and pricing will be evaluated. Customers are unwittingly also making decisions based on how quickly your site responds. If your server is slow or crashing due to an unusually high number of customers visiting your website, they are likely to abandon their cart. Don’t let your hard earned marketing dollars go to waste. Follow these simple steps to ensure that the busiest time of the year is also going to be your most profitable and least frustrating.

Magento Hosting Checklist – Preparing Your Site for Black Friday

1. Test your site
2. Estimate traffic
3. Increase capacity of your web servers and database
4. Block malicious bot abuse
5. Add Magento booster servers to handle traffic spikes
6.  Contact Us If you need a turn-key solution

Test Your Site

With heavy spikes in traffic around the holiday season, your site can become slow with an increase in page loading times. The speed of your site can affect your bottom line. Run a load test on your site to determine the relationship between page load times and visitors.  Be careful not to disrupt your business during high volume hours if you are testing the production site – this can cause the site to become slow or even go down. Ideally, run the load test on your staging server.  There are various tools out there that you can use for load testing.  Let’s look at an example below that was benchmarked with Load Impact.

Notice the yellow arrow in the simulation below?  This test revealed that the page load times started to increase with about 400 users.  Now, look at the red arrow.  Page load times shot up to almost 20 seconds with approx. 480 simulated visitors.

If your marketing efforts lead to an increase in traffic (more than 400 users in this example), then you need to consider adding an extra booster server so you don’t lose out on any conversions. Let our Magento experts run a load test for you.  Send us an email:  magento@eboundhost.com

Estimate Traffic

How much of a traffic spike you can expect this year through your marketing efforts?  Do you plan on doubling, tripling or quadrupling your holiday traffic? Use Google Analytics to obtain your historic web visitor traffic data.

Gather Google Analytics web visitor data

A.  Within Google Analytics, navigate to AUDIENCE > OVERVIEW
B.  Set your date range to:  10/01/2016 – 10/01/2017
C.  Make a note of your highest “Daily Session” value

Example:  The highest daily session value in this screenshot is 1,000.

D. Calculate your “concurrent user” value
Users = Hourly Sessions x Average Session Duration (in seconds) / 3,600
Example: 500 x 60 / 3,600 = Approx. 8

 

Increase Capacity On Your Web Servers and Database

Increase your capacity by adding the appropriate caching technologies. There are several tools such as Varnish, Redis and CloudFlare that can help. One example of a popular front-end caching technology that will speed up your site is Varnish.  There are tutorials and guides available to help you with this.

http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.0/config-guide/varnish/config-varnish-magento.html

Need assistance? Our Magento Success Team is available at  888-554-9990.

Block Malicious Bot Abuse

Block malicious bots/competitors and reduce more load by using a content delivery network.  Cloudflare’s expansive network identifies and blocks bots across 6 million properties with their predictive security feature. Their distribution network is powered by 118 data centers around the world.  You can get a free account by using this link:  https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/

We are proud to partner with CloudFlare.  All of our holiday booster servers include the service and setup of CloudFlare Pro.

 

Add Magento Booster Servers To Handle Traffic Spikes

Add Magento booster servers to handle your traffic spikes and stabilize your site during the holiday season.  Let’s look at an example of what the JetRails® Magento booster servers can do to prepare your site for the busy season.

In this example, we are working off an environment that consists of 2 servers (one web server and one database server).  The addition of 3 Magento JetRails® Booster Servers tripled the visitor capacity during peak times.

 

Contact Us

Make sure your web visitors don’t go to your competitors.  Our Magento Success Team is available to test your site and help you prepare for the holidays.  Load balanced Booster Servers are $500 each and can be set up by our engineers within days.  Contact us or call us at 888-554-9990 to get started now.