There was a 48% increase in transactions recorded in 2017, in comparison to 2016*. According to Google, “Black Friday” queries were up 125% in 2017, and 46% of people who made purchases on Black Friday 2017 say they took advantage of promotions to do their Christmas shopping early. Black Friday has therefore officially become the most important day for online retailers. The retail high season has begun! So, nothing must be left to chance.
Performance is now users’ no. 1 priority (even more so as they browse from their mobile). What’s the use in optimizing content that has trouble loading?
To put the odds on your side and improve your conversion rate (desktop and mobile), our technical team shares its 5 best practice tips for web performance.
Have you estimated your earnings lost due to your website’s performance yet?
Tip 1: Check your cache settings
You can never be too careful. Take the time to check that your static resources and your catalogue pages are properly cached.
Also, avoid emptying your cache at 8 a.m. on the very same day, which is when your users will need it most. Remember to do so the day before.
Tip 2: Prepare and optimize overflow pages
When too many users are visiting your website, the overflow page will ask some of them to wait for a few seconds. Better still, you can add an email field to your overflow page offering to notify your users when they can finalize their order.
Tip 3: Keep a close eye on good monitoring tools
For more peace of mind on the day, we recommend that you properly equip yourself in terms of Real User Monitoring (RUM) and Application Performance Monitoring (APM). This way, you will have a good overview of the user experience and what is happening on your servers.
Tip 4: Feel free to degrade some features
Disabling certain features such as tracking or customization, under heavy traffic, may improve your website’s performance and avoid the SPOF (Single Point Of Failure). Remember to inform your Third Parties of timeouts.
Tip 5: Automate your webperf optimizations
Are you sure that all your queries are optimized as they should be (concatenation, minification, lazyloading, image optimization, etc.)? Make sure that all your resources are optimized, at all times, for all web users. Automation is the key!
