Picture the scene. Your marketing team sends out an email blast to promote an upcoming Black Friday sale. Visitors come rushing to the site, but your hosting plan isn’t set up for this sudden surge. The site slows, baskets get abandoned, and you’re suddenly tasked with fixing the issue while the site is still live and full of potential shoppers. Luckily, you can avoid this.
More than 75% of the UK’s Black Friday spending happens online today. If you’re an e-commerce developer, here’s how to make sure your sites and hosting packages are set up to take advantage.
Black Friday e-commerce checklist – 5 key actions
1. Start preparing early
“Last year, 70% of shopping-related search volume containing “black friday” happened in October and in the days leading up to the day itself.” – Google Data, 2022 – 2023
Black Friday is no longer a one-day event; you might start to see your traffic creeping up days or even weeks before. Plus, marketing and sales teams may launch promotional campaigns in advance to drum up excitement. So, start creating your plan of action now, if you haven’t already. Time is of the essence!
Tip: Make sure there’s an open line of communication between you, marketing and sales, so you know when promotional campaigns are going live and what kind of traffic surges to expect.
2. Run a capacity test
A capacity test (otherwise called a ‘stress test’) is one of the most effective ways to prepare for Black Friday.
This is your chance to simulate a traffic spike based on your forecasted traffic and identify any performance issues. You can then fix them before shoppers start flooding in. Testing your site’s infrastructure will help you figure out when and where it begins to buckle, so you can make the right changes, proactively.
If you’re not familiar with capacity testing, ask your hosting provider for advice. Some hosts will be able to run these tests and present you with the key results. These can give you real insight how your site holds up under heavy traffic.
Tip: Review last year’s Black Friday data before your stress test – like how many visitors you got and how they behaved. This will help your hosting partner set up a realistic simulation for more accurate results.
3. Interpreting your capacity test results
Next, discuss the test results with your hosting provider. They’ll be able to give you insights into your server’s behaviour during the tests. For instance, if your available resources (e.g. CPU/RAM) were reached, you may need to scale these resources or your hosting plan to handle your expected traffic.
Sometimes, stress tests expose unexpected issues with the website itself. If, for example, a website slows down considerably when under high traffic, but the server resources aren’t being pushed to the limits, then you may need to examine your web/application logs to find the bottleneck. We’ve seen examples where third-party plugins rate limit or blacklist persistent requests.
Tip: Schedule maintenance periods at your website’s quietest times, when traffic tends to be at its lowest. Then, if you come across performance issues, you’ll be able to take care of them without disrupting too many shoppers.
4. Focus on lowering Time to First Byte
“A site that loads in 1 second has an e-commerce conversion rate 2.5x higher than a site that loads in 5 seconds.” – Portent
To make sure that a slow site doesn’t have a direct hit on your potential revenue this Black Friday, try lowering your Time to First Byte (TTFB). This will speed up your site’s response to your customers’ requests.
One way to do this is to cache your site so that it doesn’t need to regenerate content with every request. You can also set up DNS caching via a provider like Cloudflare to speed up your page loading times.
Tip: If you host your e-commerce site on ProStack Cito, simply enable ‘Boost’ to speed up your site by up to 10x. You can also ask us for help with setting up and managing your Cloudflare account.
5. Increase site responsiveness
Increasing TTFB is a great first step, but you should also focus on boosting your site’s responsiveness metrics, like Interaction to Next Paint (INP).
One way to do this is to strip back your main conversion pages to include only essential components. Large images, videos, and third-party plugins can all slow down your site and make it difficult for visitors to navigate.
Tip: Ask your hosting provider to run a speed test alongside your capacity test. This will help you to identify components that are affecting critical metrics like TTFB and INP.
Is your hosting plan Black Friday-ready?
The long and short of it is that a rock-solid hosting plan is key to surviving Black Friday.
To make sure you have the right package with a reliable provider, ask yourself the following:
- Does my hosting partner use real-time alert monitoring to flag and fix server issues proactively?
- Do my customers’ e-commerce sites have enough server space, or am I cramming too many onto the same package?
- Can I scale my hosting package easily, such as by extending my server resources?
- Does my hosting package come with built-in security, so my customers’ sites are protected against malware?
If you’re not sure, now is the time to contact your hosting provider and evaluate your options.
Book a free capacity test with ProStack
Let’s help you avoid any headaches this Black Friday. Book a free capacity test with ProStack and we’ll:
- Stress test your server setup outside of critical periods.
- Run performance optimisations on your site.
- Review the results and suggest the best next steps.
Already a ProStack customer? Great! Simply give your account manager a call to get started.
Not a ProStack customer? No worries! We’ll simply set up a replica of your site on a trial server. Drop us a message and let’s begin.