During peak season, it is advisable to prepare beforehand to make sure your online store is ready to handle increased visits. This might be Christmas, Ramadhan, or maybe company flash sale or events. These are 5 tips you might want to consider before the holiday comes:
1. Predict the increase of traffic
Take a look at your historical data and upcoming events, if you could get some idea on how heavy the traffic to your website would be, it will be great because you can prepare and test your server beforehand. When your server is overloaded, customers cannot visit, add products to cart, or even finish their payments.
2. Simulate and test the prepared server
With the prediction ready, you can load test your server infrastructure to make sure the website could run smoothly. Several tools you could use to simulate the traffics are Siege and Jmeter. If your server cannot handle the predicted traffic, it might be idea to temporarily increase the resource of the server such as CPU increase / memory increase.
3. Check your subscription / resources
If you are using third party system, make sure everything is available. You do not want your subscription to run out / depleted during important times (e.g. email quota running out, CDN transfer limit, server bandwidth)
4. Prepare your campaign
From inventory, special price time, landing page, banners, coupons, and sales rules, make sure everything is in place and able to run normally.
5. Monitor for resource hogging jobs
If you have long-running non-critical cron jobs, you might want to consider turning it off during peak hours. Also it is good to avoid changing config, clearing cache, or re-indexing the website as it might make the performance to fall.
