Cyber Monday, the online take on Black Friday, takes place the Monday after Thanksgiving with incredible deals going on online. For online retailers, Cyber Monday represents the highest grossing sale day of the year. Having a slow e-commerce site, even for a few minutes, can cost millions of dollars.
Not long ago, it took eight seconds for a person to leave a site that did not load fast enough. Then, that time period was reduced to six, then to four seconds. Now, the rule of thumb is two seconds. The bar is high, and it keeps rising all the time. If you want to avoid losing half of your potential customers during Cyber Monday, check out the most common causes of site slowdown.
1. Server Performance
A fast website means a better user experience. If your server’s performance is weak, it will take longer to respond, and it will inevitably affect how customers react to your business. No matter how quick everything else is, a slow server will always give you a slow start.
Poor server performance is almost always related to your web host. A web host that is not that expensive will usually give you a shared server, which means you’re sharing space and resources with countless other websites.
2. Server Location
It is true that if you have a server that is located in a data center that is closer to you (physically and logically closer), the latency of the connection will be less than if you place this server on the other side of the world.
If a Chinese visitor clicks on your website, the server receives a message from your website to send the requested information. Upon receiving this request, the server transmits HTTP Request Packets, which include website files that are then rendered by the visitor’s browser. The data has to travel back and forth all the way across the Pacific Ocean, causing small delays when displaying the information on their screens.
3. Increased Traffic
Even if your website is properly optimized to run efficiently, in specific dates, such as Cyber Monday or Black Friday, you can experience a peak in traffic all at once that exhausts your server's physical resources.
It is essential to try to strip your website down to its most bare basics if you will be expecting a large volume of traffic in one day. In this way, your website can continue to run, even while receiving traffic that is larger than its normal levels.
On specific dates, your website cannot fail. When a page takes too long to load or making an online purchase, customers get frustrated and turn to the competition. If you have any issue, you have to fix it – and you need to do it fast.
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