It may seem a bit early, but with Black Friday and the holidays ahead of us, it’s important to ensure that the hosting environment of your store is in top condition. It would be a huge waste to miss out on customer conversions because your site is too slow or cannot be reached. By working with your developer and hosting provider, you could see record-setting sales instead. In this blog post I will explain how you can achieve that in only three steps!
Step 1: Determine your store’s current performance
The first thing we recommend is to analyze your store’s current performance. Is your store performing optimally, or are there still improvements to be made? A slow or, even worse, inaccessible site is something that must be avoided at all costs. Hypernode offers you various handy tools to help you optimize your store, such as automatic image optimization tool, performance reports with load times for all your pages, the PageSpeed Booster and an overview of any installed extensions and modules that require updates. Our support documentation contains a list of all our Magento performance optimization tips.
Step 2: Estimate your expected traffic
To achieve those record-breaking holiday sales, you’ll aim to attract as many visitors as possible, of course. To that end it’s important to estimate your anticipated visitor numbers accurately, taking into account any sales promotions, ad campaigns or other marketing efforts. The easiest way to do this is to look at past figures for other years’ Black Friday and holiday peak periods. Was your current hosting plan sufficient, or did your store run into trouble? If you’re having a hard time coming up with good numbers, ask your developer. They should be able to help out.
Tip: Traffic peaks are often the result of an ad campaign or newsletter. To prevent peak loads, try sending your newsletters in batches. Have you scheduled such an event? Don’t forget to adapt your hosting to fit.
Step 3: Upgrade your hosting environment as needed
If it becomes clear that you will in fact need to scale up to a more powerful hosting plan temporarily, don’t skimp. To make those record sales, you must avoid a slow or inaccessible store. The great thing about Hypernode is that you can adapt your hosting plan daily as needed and you can schedule your upgrades and downgrades in advance.
Use your Control Panel to check whether you require more or less capacity and adjust your hosting plan to fit. That way it will always be just right, and you’ll never overpay!
Caught off guard after all?
Is it Saturday afternoon and is your store unexpectedly jam-packed? If you’d rather avoid having your store suddenly go down for hours on a weekend, be sure to have firm agreements in place with your developer about management and maintenance outside regular working hours.
Moral of this story: making smart use of Black Friday’s popularity can lead to record sales. However, to achieve this you will need to work with your developer and hosting provider. So, keep them informed of all your clever schemes for the coming holiday season!
Hi! My name is Dion, Account Manager at Hypernode
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