Harrison 
The 2022 holiday season is over, according to Adobe US online spending is $211.7 billion — 3.5% increase from the previous year.
If you’re an e-commerce store owner, these statistics show that the holiday season is a great time to make big gains. If you can attract shoppers with attractive sales and discounts, you can end the year with a bang.
However, you need a crash-proof e-commerce store to withstand the high volume of traffic that comes with the holiday season. Otherwise, your e-commerce website will go down and your brand reputation will suffer.
For example, Ulta Beauty, a major beauty retailer, suffered a meltdown hours before its Black Friday sale, and customers took to social media to express their anger.
This guide will help you make your e-commerce website crash-safe by covering things to check before a big sale.
What to check on your e-commerce website before the big sale
Traffic volume
hosting infrastructure
website performance
caching system
Plugins and extensions
website security
code error
Backup and disaster recovery
Traffic volume
How much traffic do I get per day? Website traffic data is typically available through Google Analytics. If you haven’t set it up yet, you can add Google Analytics to your WordPress website in minutes.
In addition to that, you should also get the traffic numbers of previous sales. These numbers will give you a rough idea of the traffic you can expect for your next sale.
If you anticipate traffic, use load testing tools to Test your e-commerce website. For example, you can use New Relic to gradually increase traffic and check the stability of your website. At Nexcess, New Relic integration support.
Use the traffic numbers from previous sales as a baseline, but you can also increase traffic by 200% and load test your website to look for bottlenecks that are limiting performance.
Now that you know the limitations of your website, let’s move on to hosting.
hosting infrastructure
Your web hosting plan determines the number of resources you have on your website. You need to make sure that your website has enough resources to withstand the spike in traffic.
If you are using a cPanel-based host, you can check the status of your website through resource usage. If your usage consistently exceeds the limit (indicated by the red line), your website’s performance will be affected and you will need to upgrade your plan.
Not to mention, you can also check the timestamps corresponding to the load tests you ran in the previous section to see how your hosting plan’s resources performed.
If your web host performs well in everyday conditions but has problems during load tests, check to see if it offers autoscaling.and autoscaling, E-commerce sites get the resources they need to meet high demand during sales.
For example, Nexcess allows you to scale up your resources to meet your traffic demands and also offers 24 free autoscale hours per month per hosting plan.
The reliability (also known as uptime) of your hosting provider is also important. At a minimum, your web host should provide uptime that matches 99.9 percent of industry standards. Also, check your host’s uptime during the holiday season (especially Black Friday).
Nexcess typically enjoys near 100% uptime throughout the year.
website performance
How your website performs during a big sale is very important. If your product pages load slowly, your visitors may move on to other pages.
How fast should a web page load? Less than 3 seconds — 53% of online buyers share that, according to Digital.com research.
You can check the performance of your e-commerce website through PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix. If your website has a low score, resolve the issue as soon as possible. Core Web Vitals are important for search engine optimization (SEO).
You can improve your website’s performance by following the recommendations (or opportunities) shared by PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix.
caching system
To prevent your e-commerce website from crashing, you need to reduce the load on your website hosting server. What would be the best way to do it? Use cache. Caching allows dynamic content to be stored in static HTML, reducing the load on the server.
If you’re already using a caching solution, make sure it’s configured correctly so that your server doesn’t have to recreate frequently accessed pages during peak request times.
In addition to that, make sure you’re using a content delivery network (CDN) in combination with your caching system. CDNs allow you to store your website’s cached content on distributed proxy servers around the world.
As a result, your visitors will experience faster loading times (the content is retrieved from nearby servers) and your website receives fewer requests (the CDN handles the majority of requests).
Plugins and extensions
WordPress plugins and Magento extensions add valuable functionality to your e-commerce website, but they also consume valuable server resources (some more than others). For example, All in One SEO can slow down the backend and frontend of your website.
If you host your WordPress site with Nexcess, you have access to the Plugin Performance Monitor. This tool will help you see how your plugins impact your loading times before the next big sale.
In addition to that, you should also look into your e-commerce site’s plugins and extensions to ensure that all the items listed are valuable. For example, you may have installed a maintenance mode plugin that you no longer need.
Finally, plugin updates often include performance improvements, so make sure each plugin and extension is up to date.
website security
To avoid e-commerce website crashes, you should also audit your website’s security. In particular, you need protection against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. In a DDoS attack, a malicious agent or hacker attempts to crash a website by overloading the server.
You may rely on a CDN to counter DDoS attacks. A CDN reduces server load and attacks by caching a website’s static content.
However, a CDN alone is not always sufficient, as large-scale DDoS attacks can overwhelm the CDN’s capacity.
Instead, you may need to add an extra layer of security from your web hosting provider or sign up for a paid DDoS protection service, such as Amazon’s AWS Shield.
Nexcess offers ModSecurity, a web application firewall that protects e-commerce websites from DDoS attacks by limiting incoming requests from a single address and blocking suspicious agents.
However, website security doesn’t end with DDoS protection. After a big holiday sale, you would expect big profits, not a huge data breach. Ensure your customers’ payment card data is safe by choosing PCI-compliant hosting.
code error
Quality assurance must be taken seriously. After all, developers can make mistakes in the form of typos.
While your live website is off-limits (if you don’t want to disturb your visitors), you can use the staging website to test and troubleshoot your product pages, cart flow, and checkout process. Masu. Most hosting services offer free staging sites with their premium plans. Otherwise, try a staging website plugin.
Nexcess lets you set up one free staging site per domain.
Backup and disaster recovery
If something goes wrong and your site crashes, you should have a backup so you can restart your website later. Choose daily backups to minimize loss of progress.
Backup services are typically obtained from a host. However, some hosting providers do not offer daily backups for free or only in their premium packages. In that case, you can choose a free backup plugin like UpdraftPlus.
When you host your website with Nexcess, you get free daily backups with all hosting plans.
Finally: 8 things to check to avoid e-commerce website crashes
If your website crashes on your big day, everything you’ve done to prepare for the sale will be undone. Instead of increasing your profits, you leave with a hit to your brand reputation.
But you can avoid that by partnering with a hosting provider that understands your website’s needs and provides all the resources and support to make it a huge success on sale day.
With Nexcess’ managed hosting plans, woo commerce and Magento It comes with autoscaling, free CDN, and robust security to make your e-commerce website crash-proof. Not to mention, enjoy 24/7 support, daily backups, and PCI compliance.
If you manage a company, check out our enterprise hosting packages, which offer everything including managed hosting plans.
