3 Tips for Getting Your Website Off Santa’s Naughty List

By Kavitha Mariappan

With the holiday shopping season approaching, you can expect many shoppers to do last-minute online gift buying, require immediate deliveries, and, of course, there are all those pesky post-holiday returns and exchanges. Will your website be able to deal with this annual shopping frenzy? By putting a little effort in planning ahead of the frenzy and by following a few e-commerce pre-holiday tips highlighted below, you can ensure that your customer's experience is both positive and cheerful for the holiday buying season.

1. Increase your website speed and availability to deliver a positive online shopping experience. End user web performance expectations have increased — and so have their demands. A one-second-performance delay can be the difference between a profitable and unprofitable sales year. Sound scary? It is.

According to a recent Harris Poll sponsored by Riverbed Technology, 68 percent of U.S. adults expect to shop online for gifts this upcoming holiday season. Additionally, more than three-quarters of U.S. adult online shoppers feel that website reliability and reputation is critical in their eventual purchase decision and consideration of using an online merchant. The poll also found that one-third of online shoppers have experienced problems when shopping online; 44 percent have had to cancel their online purchase midway through the checkout process due to website delays, and 89 percent would simply stop shopping at an online store as a result of a poor website experience.

I recommend online retailers implement sophisticated web traffic management and content optimization tools that will improve website performance by offloading computer-intensive tasks and balancing workloads across web and application servers to ensure optimal performance. You can even apply some simple optimization tools to your web content to reduce web page load times. This will create a positive holiday shopping experience and can ultimately increase sales throughout the year.

2. Create a more secure and reliable website. This can be considered a "no kidding" tip, yet many online retailers put all their eggs in the basket of website aesthetics without considering the need for a reliable and smooth-running website. The same research mentioned above shows that more than 75 percent of adult shoppers feel that website reliability and reputation is extremely/very important. Clearly these should be top of mind to your company. By incorporating advanced application delivery and application-level security tools into your solution, you'll have the peace of mind that your website maintains the highest level of service availability and security, especially during peak traffic times such as the holidays.

3. Optimize, optimize and did I say optimize! The mobile shopping experience continues to evolve, with consumers using smartphones, tablets and other high-tech gadgets to do online and in-store shopping. Therefore, online retailers need to tailor and optimize their website content (i.e., text, images and other rich content) and performance (i.e., minimize roundtrips and improve page load times) to enable a rich user experience.

Online retailers need to invest in the right web content optimization tool that's capable of testing and optimizing their website performance and rich content in real time, regardless of the device or browser your customer uses to access your website. Retailers that implement optimization technologies will not only enhance their customer's experience, but they can ensure that their site won't be on Santa's naughty list.

Don't let poor website performance put a damper on your bottom line this holiday season. It's not too late to put these tips and technologies on your holiday wish list.

Kavitha Mariappan is the director of product marketing for the Stingray product line at Riverbed Technology. Follow her on Twitter @kmariappan.