Cyber Monday once again broke sales records in 2023, with U.S. consumers spending $12.4 billion in a single day, with electronics, toys, apparel, and furniture purchases leading the way.
But if your e-commerce site wasn’t prepared to handle a spike in web traffic, you might not have been able to benefit from the holiday rush as much as you could have otherwise. Website performance issues are a recurring problem during the busy shopping season, leading to lost sales and frustrated customers from downtime.
Of course, the holidays aren’t the only times your website could experience sudden spikes in traffic. By understanding how and why to prepare your site, you can avoid downtime and consistently provide a quality experience for your customers.
Potential Problems Caused By Excess Web Traffic
Depending on how your website is set up, a sudden increase in traffic can cause it to crash. For example, some hosting plans have bandwidth limits, and when a site reaches that limit because of so many people sending and receiving data at the same time, the site will go down.
Traffic surges can also strain the hardware of the hosting server, resulting in lengthy load times or an unresponsive site. And these problems can become quite costly.
In fact, Gremlin reports that Amazon experiences $220,318.80 in revenue loss per minute of downtime. While your own e-commerce site likely wouldn’t experience losses of that magnitude, there’s no denying that extended downtime will result in lost sales as customers leave your site.
How to Prepare Your Website For Traffic Spikes
So, how do you ensure your website can handle a sudden surge in traffic? Start by evaluating your current hosting solution. A website hosting provider that offers unlimited bandwidth is a good start, but you should also ensure that your solution offers faster hosting solutions (such as load-balancing solutions or content delivery networks) that won’t get overwhelmed by traffic increases.
Website optimization can also help you better manage your bandwidth. For example, caching web content with a WordPress plugin can reduce how many resources are needed to handle page requests. Optimizing images and videos through compression will also improve load times and make your website better able to handle traffic spikes.
Many e-commerce sites also run load testing or stress testing during low-traffic times, in which they simulate traffic spikes to see what level of traffic causes the site to fail or slow down. Knowing your site’s current limits will make it easier to identify and address needed changes before traffic spikes happen in real life. For example, determining your site’s limits could cause you to stagger how you send out promotional emails so that email clicks are spaced out over a longer period of time.
Finally, it’s also worth noting that some traffic spikes can result from hacker attacks, in which hackers use botnets to overwhelm your website infrastructure. A security plugin can monitor incoming connection requests to identify suspicious patterns and filter out bot traffic.
Deliver a Better Experience
By ensuring that your website can handle increases in traffic due to sales or seasonal demand, you can maintain uptime and deliver a quality online experience. At Site Rockstar, we offer WordPress Hosting with unlimited bandwidth, 99.9% uptime and integrated Content Delivery Network (CDN) so you can provide reliable, lightning-fast online shopping for your customers.
