Imagine this, you launched a new product and it was tweeted about by a popular social media personality, making its video go viral, thereby increasing the traffic to your website significantly.
Not just that, even during those big sales days of the year, like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc., your business website will encounter peak traffic.
While this increased traffic is great for your business, helping increase your revenue ultimately, the worst-case scenario is that your website can crash, leaving you flustered, not knowing what to do.
The good news is, there are some effective steps that you can follow to avoid your business website from crashing with heavy traffic.
✓ Use a CDN
One of the straightforward solutions to prevent your website from crashing due to heavy traffic this holiday season is to use a content delivery network (CDN).
This is basically a cloud-based scaling service that automatically scales itself to optimize content delivery to your customers in the best and most reliable way possible.
When you use a CDN service, your customers will be able to use your website regardless of how many other visitors use your site for a similar purpose.
Also, they will be able to download the necessary content from your website easily and quickly regardless of how farther away they are.
✓ Test Your Website
One of the best ways to protect your website from crashing during heavy traffic is to actually test its performance under pressure.
With so many cloud testing tools available at your disposal, website scalability is no longer a mystery; therefore, you don’t have to learn the hard way that your website cannot handle heavy loads in terms of traffic.
Use of the cloud testing solutions to simulate traffic spike to your servers and have your developers determine the weak spots. This will enable you to come up with a plan to execute when the worst happens.
✓ Backup Daily
In some cases, regardless of what you do to prevent crashes, your website can still crash. This is why making everyday backups of your website and all its databases is extremely essential.
As a result, even if your site crashes under heavy traffic, the backup you have will make sure that the content on your site remains current.
Unless you have a proper experienced team that can do this for you, the best way to carry out backups is to use the services of a server and web hosting company.
✓ Use Load Balancing Software
As you know, a server delivers slow response time or crashes when it gets too much pressure from traffic.
By using load balancing software, heavy traffic to your website will be rerouted to other servers that can manage the same, instead of applying all the pressure on a single server.
The software constantly monitors your website’s traffic and makes the same even, thus cutting down the stress encountered by one specific server.
✓ Keep Software Up-to-Date
In addition to protecting your website from potential cyber attacks, keeping all your website software up-to-date also helps manage heavy traffic it encounters during the holiday season.
From your shopping cart to content management systems and everything in between, update your software at a regular basis and always have them running in their latest versions.
This is important because even the bugs found in the older software versions can sometimes cause your website to crash.
Moreover, having everything up-to-date will prevent your customers’ valuable data from being stolen by hackers, thereby improving your brand reputation.
✓ Simplify Your Web Design
When your website receives heavy traffic, even the smallest mishap can lead to crashing, and one such aspect would be your web design.
When it comes to the design of your web pages, remember that every single element on a page can influence its loading time, which becomes even more cumbersome during heavy traffic days.
To prevent this, just simplify the design of your website by using tools such as GTmetrix, Make the Web Faster from Google, etc. to identify those elements that out more pressure on the already exhausted servers.
These tools will also give you suggestions on what can be done to increase the load time of your pages.
For any business that has its website playing a crucial role in its sales, website crashing, especially during the busiest days of the year, can be extremely destructive.
Use these simple yet highly effective tips to prepare your website for such an instance, so you can avoid huge revenue loss and a damaged reputation.
Zaproo is a company that can help you in making your website scalable when it comes to serves and traffic so if you'd like to consult with us, shoot us an email!