La Christmas campaign is a real litmus test for a Online store. At this time, the volume of orders increases, as well as the demands of customers.
The selection of a good delivery service, the forecast of stock, the speed when it comes to serving orders or answering inquiries are some issues that put customers in check. eCommerce at Christmas more than at any other time of the year.
Jason Miller, Chief Trade Strategist for Akamai, the global leader in CDN (Content Delivery Network) services, provides some tips to help online stores prepare to tackle the next wave of holiday shopping successfully.
Tips for testing the resistance and stress of an online store to make sure it is prepared for the Christmas campaign
Miller explains that traffic spikes Caused by flash sales or new product launches can be problematic for many retailers during the holiday season. Preparing websites to withstand such spikes in traffic can have a significant impact on revenue. A website's ability to deliver a great customer experience can depend on three key areas: infrastructure, application code, and CDN settings.
"Although there are still a few weeks to reach Christmas, now is the ideal time to carry out a load test of the peak threshold in order to determine how many users or how much traffic load our website can handle before being unable to respond"explains Miller. "In a perfect world, each retailer would have a test environment that would exactly mirror their production environment to perform this test, but that is not the case for many of them." For this reason, Miller recommends that the first thing to do is to test your production environment is to ensure that you are coordinated with the IT, data center and CDN teams before and during testing to avoid any disruption to the traffic generated by the customers. Without proper coordination, you could lead to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) on your own website.
When testing on the site, it should be done with patterns that real users would use to access the site. These are some key tips for testing a website:
- Use usage patterns from analytics to create the flow through the site from product navigation, add to cart and checkout.
- Apply analytics to define the most common regions and connection speed that users experience to get an accurate assessment.
- When calculate expected traffic load for the website, the following criteria must be taken into consideration: traffic peaks from previous years; future marketing campaigns plus add 10-20 percent more to cover unexpected traffic patterns. The subsequent monitoring and results will help to understand if the website architecture is well dimensioned for the expected load.
- Hardware monitoringe can uncover problems with CPU, disk, and memory usage as well as connectivity between database servers.
- Monitor every point of failure that can cause serious performance issues such as routers, firewalls, and internal proxy services.
- You can use the application monitoring to find long execution requests, process overuse, and how many calls per minute the application can handle.
- La CDN configuration it is key to offloading traffic from the source infrastructure to the edge of the Internet. Cache object and timing settings can allow up to 100 percent of static assets to be offloaded and dramatically reduce infrastructure load. Dynamic site acceleration and adaptive image compression can be used to optimize rapidly changing content (such as personalization) and align image compression to help optimize the multi-device experience.
- Verify that providers can handle the additional load. If testing or personalization providers cannot keep up with consumer requests, there is a risk that empty pages or incomplete content will be displayed. Worse still, some third-party tags can slow down the site or block the entire page if the tags are not implemented correctly and prevent you from using asynchronous calls. Tag management solutions can help monitor for these issues, as well as disable poorly behaving tags without having to make code-level changes to the website.
In addition to increasing consumer traffic, lhe Christmas season generates a significant increase in attack traffic. Miller recalls that last year on Black Friday, the Akamai Smart Platform saw a 2,5-fold increase in the number of attacks compared to the previous four Fridays. Likewise, there has been an increase in the number of DDoS attacks to extort bitcoin (for more information on this type of attack, click here). Therefore, when testing a website, it is important to ensure that you have a robust cloud-based web application firewall and a DDoS mitigation platform.