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Black Friday is when eCommerce sites face their toughest critics: deal-hunting shoppers with zero patience for glitches.
Were you aware that 47 of visitors anticipate a website to finish loading within 2 seconds? Even more concerning, half of the visitors will leave a sluggish website and switch to a competitor. One crash during busy times can lead to significant financial loss and permanent harm to your brand's image.
Therefore, in this article, we will discuss the risks, typical obstacles, and concrete techniques for ensuring your website performs well under high-traffic stress.
To proactively address these problems before they impact customers, collaborate with our expert Automation Testing Services.
What Happens When Websites Crash on Black Friday? (And How to Avoid It!)
Did you know that the average cost of downtime has reached up to $9,000 per minute for large organizations?
These power failures cause not just monetary loss but also diminish customer confidence during peak times like Black Friday, which require smooth transactions. Technology issues can cause customers to change their brands, affecting profits and loyalty in the long run.
Several firms have faced the effects of website problems. For example, Boots, a health and beauty giant, recently saw an increase in demand, necessitating the adoption of a temporary queueing system to manage the traffic. Following this quick adjustment, the website returned to its normal state. These situations reveal how critical resilient infrastructure is for accommodating abrupt traffic increases.
Companies should focus on load testing, scalable servers, and real-time monitoring to manage Black Friday sales spikes effectively.
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Top Reasons Why Websites Crash During Black Friday Sales
Black Friday Sale is an event that can provide a great opportunity for online businesses, but at the same time, it is a huge challenge: dealing with high levels of influx in traffic across websites. Here are the reasons websites often get down during this period and how to fix these issues.
Find Out if Your Website Can Manage 10x More Visitors
Traffic volumes rise on Black Friday, frequently by ten times or more. If the website's hosting server configuration isn't elastic or can't scale out, such high traffic can be infeasible to manage. Stress indicators include sluggish page loading times, server issues, and, ultimately, a total system failure. Because most cloud hosting solutions are natural autoscaling, selecting scalable resources is crucial.
Backend Weak Points: How Databases and Servers Can Fail Under Pressure
A large volume of traffic can have a significant impact on your databases, servers, and application layers. Bottlenecks caused by slow database queries, lack of server resources, or incorrect load balancer configurations can severely impact website performance and disrupt customer transactions. Improving database efficiency and performing routine stress testing can assist in detecting and addressing vulnerabilities.
Third-Party Dependencies and How APIs and Payment Gateways Can Be Your Achilles Heel
During these events, practically every website uses third-party services like payment gateways and APIs to perform shipping and inventory management functions. So, if those services are unavailable, your website may experience downtime. This risk can be minimized by providing backup systems and correctly verifying the reliability of all third-party integrations.
Lack of Preparation: The Hidden Risks of Skipping Load Testing
Load testing targets are also very important at critical moments when traffic is high. Without simulations of projected traffic on the system, all failure sites are unlikely to be discovered until it is too late. Regular testing and ensuring that these critical features are implemented under high-pressure scenarios guarantees that the system is prepared to handle the Black Friday surge.
Your Black Friday Website Readiness Questionnaire
When getting ready for Black Friday, it should not be just about making sure the server can handle the load but also focus on the key areas that can create obstacles to website functioning. Here is a list to assess if your website is prepared for a sudden increase in traffic:
Have You Simulated Expected Traffic Volumes?
Assessing the traffic frequency during such events can help in ensuring effective website performance. Check if your e-commerce store website's server can bear the sudden increase in traffic. Perform e-commerce load testing to identify potential bottlenecks and ensure smooth scalability.
Is Your Infrastructure Ready for Stress and Scalability Testing?
An expandable infrastructure is essential for handling varying levels of traffic. Is your hosting provider capable of providing automatic scaling cloud solutions? Stress testing guarantees your servers and databases can manage sudden spikes, while a resource expansion plan avoids disruptions during surges.
Are Your Checkout and Cart Systems Resilient?
Customers get frustrated and abandon their shopping carts if there is any delay in processing transactions. All the back and forth has brought us to this crucial part about Black Friday sales, the checkout, and the cart features of the businesses. In this sense, consider high traffic as a necessity while stress testing the systems to make sure that there are no performance lags during peak time
Have You Tested Your Payment Gateway Under Heavy Load?
If the payment gateway does not work, customers will give up on their purchases. Testing your payment gateway under high-volume conditions is crucial to guarantee it can manage the traffic of Black Friday smoothly, without any issues or delays.
How to Prepare Your Website for Black Friday With Performance Testing Best Practices
Performance testing is essential for managing the high traffic volume during Black Friday. Decreased profits and negative brand perception are inevitable with slow-loading sites, crashes, or outages. Here's how to prepare effectively for Black Friday performance testing:
- Run Stress Tests: Test the limits of your website by exceeding its anticipated capacity to see how it performs when experiencing extreme loads. Through stress testing, you'll understand when your website may fail and how it rebounds, preparing it for Black Friday's heavy traffic.
- Test for Scalability: Make sure your website can expand automatically to handle unexpected traffic increases. It's essential to carry out some testing on your infrastructure since Black Friday is marked by unexpected spikes in traffic that can change the demand for all its users fairly quickly.
- Check Your Checkout Process: Shopping carts & checkout interfaces should be test-run on a busy load where simultaneous transactions are—as a norm—expected to take place without a glitch. Optimize payment gateway performance, so they integrate flawlessly, even during the high-volume rush of Black Friday sales.
- Monitor Real-Time Performance: By using tools like New Relic and Datadog, you can track your website's performance live, allowing you to detect and resolve issues promptly and allocate resources where they're most needed. These tools allow for tracking of the enabled website and even removing post-enabling challenges that can occur later.
By implementing these recommended techniques, your website will be prepared to manage the influx of Black Friday visitors and offer a seamless shopping experience.
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Emergency Protocols for a Flawless Black Friday Experience
Make sure the website performs well on Black Friday by preparing infrastructure and emergency protocols to manage unexpected issues efficiently. Here is how you can handle these unexpected issues:
- Backup Servers: Make sure backup servers are prepared to manage extra workload in case the primary servers malfunction or decrease speed.
- Alert Systems: Set up automated alert systems for crucial problems (server outages and payment gateway issues) to prompt instant reactions.
- Quick Response Team: Ensure a committed technical team is ready to handle and resolve issues quickly.
- Load Balancing: Incorporate load balancing to evenly spread traffic among servers and avoid causing overloads.
Wrapping Up!
An unhindered shopping experience during Black Friday can determine the success of your online business. Performance testing ensures your website's resilience, protecting revenue, customer loyalty, and brand reputation even under the heaviest traffic. In addition to preventing crashes, this preparedness improves user experience, which boosts customer loyalty and sales.
Collaborate with Alphabin to enhance the website performance of your e-commerce site and create seamless shopping experiences for your users.
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