Is your website strategy ready for Black Friday?

The countdown has begun. No, not for the excitement of New Year’s Eve or for an awe-inspiring space launch. We’re talking about Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday, the annual mad rush of frantic Christmas shoppers looking for deals after Thanksgiving.

In 2021 on Black Friday, consumers spent $109.8 billion online, up 11.9% compared to 2020. Shoppers spent an additional $10.7 billion on Cyber ​​Monday, down 1.4% from $10.8 billion in 2020.

This year may or may not be marked by the kind of unbridled enthusiasm typically seen by retailers in the past. This could be due to inflation, ongoing supply chain issues and other factors. The picture is mixed. Some retailers are expecting a less than cheerful finish to last quarter’s profit cap, while others are expecting a poor year-end profit. Because of this uncertainty, retailers are starting their campaigns much earlier this year.

So what does all this mean for online retailers? With the highs and lows of an uncertain season, make sure your business is up-to-date with the latest, most secure monitoring tools to ensure your website’s performance this busy Christmas shopping season.

These are some things you should pay close attention to.

Double check your DNS, SSL certificates

Some business owners tend not to think regularly about their DNS records and SSL certificates, let alone right before big shopping days like Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday. But they are very important to protect e-commerce sites – if you don’t, it can affect your bottom line in a big way. Peak shopping season is not the time to find out that your certificates are expired, out of date, or have been compromised and made vulnerable to attack.

SSL certificates work by ensuring that data transmitted between users and websites remains encrypted and is nearly impossible to read.

Why does your e-commerce site need an SSL certificate? SSL certificates help secure sensitive user information:

• Login information
• Credit Card Transactions
• Bank account information
• Personally identifiable information – such as name, address, date of birth
• Legal documents
• Medical records
• Other Proprietary Information

If your DNS suffers from downtime or an error, your users cannot access your website or online services. If your SSL certificate expires or, worse, is hijacked, your visitors’ browsers will block and warn them that the site is not secure. Guess what happens next?

When your customers can’t access your e-commerce site and don’t see that your site’s URL starts with “HTTPS,” they can lose consumer confidence and trust that your site is secure. This can lead to lost sales. How to monitor DNS and SSL certificates

Monitor your systems early and often

Site monitoring is extremely useful for identifying bottlenecks and potential vulnerabilities in your systems before they affect your end users. Monitoring can identify certain patterns that indicate your website is not up to the task of handling the massive traffic expected during Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday.

Uptrender tracks power outages and uptime from 230 global checkpoints. This is incredibly valuable for identifying parts of the world where you may be targeting customers for better sales performance, but are encountering bottlenecks that prevent optimal customer outreach and service.

Confirm transactions and API interactions with Monitoring of web applications and Multi-step API monitoring. You’ll gain great insights that will allow your team to address potential issues before they flow downstream to your end user base. It’s also a good idea to refrain from pushing untested updates to your site during high traffic periods if possible.

Trending website performance monitoring checks your e-commerce site 24/7, alerting you at the first sign of sudden, unexpected drops in performance. This gives your team plenty of time to push a solution as quickly as possible.

Have a plan for the day when everything goes wrong

Seems like a no-brainer, but the relatively simple process of proactive planning is sometimes put on the back burner by many organizations. Businesses are caught off guard due to a lack of proper training, slow implementation of software updates, or not using the right combination of monitoring tools. The result can be lost revenue due to customers switching to another supplier.

These are some suggestions for creating a disaster recovery plan to avoid that scenario.

Be in touch with your data center contact

Identify a go-to person for troubleshooting. The last thing you need is to have your data center perform maintenance at a critical time, or experience downtime because they haven’t prepared their systems for the massive traffic swarms. Get yourself a reliable point of contact in case the familiar stuff hits the fan.

Back up, back up and back up some more

Keeping your data in one central location without redundant backup options is a disaster waiting to happen. A power surge, heavy traffic, bad weather or a DDoS can take down your e-commerce site. Back up your critical website files and databases and set up multiple web servers in locations closest to your target market.

Analyze your third-party scripts

Many websites depend on it third party scripts and content to track analytics, embed social media tools and other features. These third-party elements require additional calls to external servers, which can slow down the performance of your website.

We recommend that you analyze the performance of third-party scripts and ensure that they are fully optimized and worth using. Don’t forget; These script providers may also experience heavy traffic and other performance-sapping events caused by Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday that may affect you!

Find out how Uptrends can help you

The takeaway

Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday are expected to deliver very healthy sales figures this year both online and at big box retailers now that the pandemic has subsided. However, inflation and other unexpected surprises can put a dent in holiday revenue projections if you don’t have a comprehensive monitoring plan to cover network bottlenecks and other issues.

Make sure your business is ready to maximize revenue this Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday. Learn more about how Uptrends monitoring solutions can keep your eCommerce business running smoothly this holiday season. Sign up for a free 30-day trial today!