Are you ready for hectic days at the (home) office? Frantically trying to make everything in order for Black Friday? Will your website, or your client’s websites, be able to handle the peaks in traffic? Tilaa has your back!
Tilaa provides enough bandwidth to make sure your VPS stays online, even on high load peak days. Curious about how to prep your VPS?
Black Friday 2021: the stampede is going to be online
With the Corona crisis in full swing, consumers have gotten used to shopping and ordering online – it is the safest way to get the best deals from around the world.
Several major retailers have already announced to close their brick and mortar stores during Thanksgiving, so it’s very likely that this Black Friday will be more online than ever. Wells Fargo even reports that 70% of consumers are unlikely to return to physical stores any time soon.
Black Friday is no longer a stand-alone 24 hour event. With social distancing in effect and the original online equivalent -Cyber Monday- right after the weekend, it will be more likely to be a 96 hour online long weekend sales extravaganza.
To sum it up: expect massive sales and massive traffic from Black Friday to Cyber Monday
With this in mind, it’s probably best to prepare your website for even more traffic than last year.
Black Friday 2021: here’s what to expect (and to do!)
Expect a long weekend with massive sales, tons of clients and people flocking to your website. This means that not only your website, but all of your systems need to be able to cope with continuous high load and spikes from the moment clients start their online shopping spree.
You must make sure you’re able to keep those customers. Guide them effortlessly (without any delays) from the product page, to their shopping basket and to the checkout.
The cost of failure if your webshop is not ready:
- Your website may go down completely due to heavy traffic
- Drops in performance decrease conversions. Even a 100-millisecond delay can reduce the conversion by 1%
- The user experience goes down. This will negatively impact user perception and trust
Examples of major Black Friday-fails
In 2019 J. Crew lost 323.000 shoppers worth $750.000 in sales during a 5-hour black out of the website. Wallmart lost $9 million in just 150 minutes of downtime. Costco went down completely for 16 hours and lost out on $11 million! The consequences in a nutshell? Less profit, a damaged reputation for the company and more sales for your competitors.
Run stress tests prior to Black Friday
Surges in your website traffic (and those of your competitors) can cause stress on the system – resulting in delays and abandoned shopping carts. So, make sure your technical team is on board for these days too and run performance tests (such as load and stress tests, as well as soak, spike and isolation tests) in advance. For example with tools like JMeter, Siege, LoadImpact, Locust, k6 or Cyberflood (Blitz.io)(there are tons of them out there, so pick one that you like and is specific to your needs and environment).
While on the technical side of things:
- Optimize your images, lower their footprint and make sure they only load when they are visible to the customer
- Embed your videos from YouTube and Vimeo
- Reduce the number of sales items on a page from 200 to 50 or even 10 for instance
- Minify CSS files and Javascript
- Make maximum use of browser caching
- Remove all unused plugins
Black Friday 2021: Tilaa’s got your back
At Tilaa we have plenty of available and additional bandwidth to be able to handle those huge traffic spikes when they start at midnight on each of these days – so you don’t have to worry about losing any sales, or having to pay a huge bill for exceeding your traffic restrictions.
Regardless of the details of your plan, all our VPSs come with unlimited traffic and a 1 Gbps network connection. Our network has more than enough bandwidth to handle traffic for even the most demanding applications. And it won't cost you a penny more! Curious about our Black Friday offers, check out our offers page.
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