Tired of waiting for your website to load? So are your employees. So are your customers.
The holiday season is just around the corner and while it’s a time for seeing friends and family, slurping down eggnog, and eating one too many cookies at the slew of holiday parties that invade your calendar, it’s also a time when a lot of business gets done online and increasingly through mobile devices. Many companies release hot new items during the holiday shopping season. Some companies receive as much as 80% of their sales revenue between Halloween and the New Year. Traffic volumes are heavy and that can make for sluggish load times and a higher instance of crashes.
If this sounds like your worst nightmare, there are several things you can do now to create a picture-perfect holiday season for your customers.
Test, test, and test again
There’s nothing like the feeling of hitting the “Go Live” button on a new website, product feature, or mobile app. Finally, the project you’ve worked on for more hours than you can remember is alive and well in the world. Everyone wants to get to that magic moment, and some people skip or lighten their testing phase as a result. While this may get you to market faster, it’s certain to carry with it headaches, lost sleep, and anxiety in the not-too-distant future. A flexible suite of load testing, script writing, and test result tracking tools is essential to make sure you go live with confidence. Ideally, you want to find a provider who can offer you both self-service and full-service options and pay-as-you-go pricing. These options allow you to stay within your budget while performing top-quality testing.
What gets measured gets done
You might feel like you work 24/7 but somewhere in there, you’re getting some shut-eye, however fleeting it may be. Who’s minding your store while you’re away? The last thing you want is to hear about a website problem from a customer. To avoid this, you need a system to provide alerts, alarms, and reports based on the end-user’s full customer experience.
Get customer feedback in a flash
How many customers get through a portion of the shopping experience on your site and then abandon their cart? You need to know how many times this happens and why. Technology can identify bottlenecks in your site experience, stress test your entire eCommerce system, and monitor page load times.
Family dinners, finding the perfect gift for your special someone, and holiday travel can be sources of stress that you can’t always control. Running your online business through the holidays is a different story. With proper testing and the integration of top-notch monitoring tools, you can rest assured that your site will be going strong long after the holidays are over.
