The largest online shopping day of the year is quickly approaching, is your e-commerce site ready for the traffic demands of Black Friday? This year we want to make sure Pagely customers have plenty of time to be prepared and set their sites up for success.
Online shopping for the 2020 holiday season is expected to surpass last year’s numbers, so here we’re offering a checklist everyone should address to prepare for extra traffic and sales. First, a few ways we’re already getting things ready on our end.
Don’t Sweat It, You’re on AWS
All Pagely accounts are backed by Amazon Web Services, ensuring you’ve got the fastest and most reliable hosting infrastructure in the industry.
It’s part of the reason you chose Pagely!
Temporary Resizes
We’re able to offer temporary weekly pricing (with 1-week minimums) to increase your server size and ensure your site stays performant under high demand. Check out our guide on temporary resizes here.
Be sure to contact our support team ASAP if you are running any sales, or expect elevated traffic, and we will work with you to figure out the details.
Optimizing Your WordPress Website
Read our step-by-step guide to ensure your WordPress site is optimized for speed and scale with Pagely’s hosting infrastructure. We recommend always utilizing these practices, and it’s especially important for e-commerce sites during Black Friday.
We cover the following:
- Page Caching Layer
- Removing Plugins or Themes Doing XHR requests to admin-ajax.php
- Transients Object Caching with Object Cache Pro
- Support HTTP/2 with an SSL Certificate
- Switch to Nginx
Basic Site Testing
Notify us ahead of your high demand periods and our support team will take a 30,000 foot view of your site to ensure you’re optimized for speed.
This isn’t load testing, but we’ll reference your access logs to make sure you have the proper functionalities and tools in place for caching and let you know if anything stands out to us that might present an issue during traffic spikes.
Black Friday Preparedness Checklist
Go through this list to ensure your site is ready for Black Friday, which happens this year on November 27th.
- Speak to your team and make sure you are aware of any marketing or promotions for Black Friday.
- Be fully aware of which products are being promoted and what the schedule is for these promotions, including social media blasts, email newsletters, and any other communications tied to specific dates and times.
- Make sure your site is optimized for speed and scale (following the guide above).
- Update your site to make sure all information is current and payment systems are working.
- Review your SSL certificate and CDN.
- Be sure your site is mobile friendly.
- Perform load testing and speed testing on your site. Google has a good developer tool for speed tests.
- Contact Pagely to alert us of any sales and expected traffic spikes.
How can we help?
Not a Pagely customer and concerned about your website’s ability to withstand the onslaught of Black Friday traffic? Talk to our technical sales team and find out how we can help.