5 Best Practices to Avoid a Site Meltdown

The time is here for the online shopping onslaught — Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the whole run up to Christmas. The promotions have been prepared, the email campaigns set up, so just one questions remains: Is your website ready to handle the volume?

The issues around website performance have never been as prominent in the news. So let's review the top tips for making sure your websites — and remember this is now across desktop, tablet and smartphone devices — are ready for showtime.

Before, During and Beyond
Keynote recommends five key best practices for Wed performance readiness:

1. have a dedicated, cross-functional readiness team;
2. load test in production across desktops, tablets and mobile devices;
3. analyze transaction performance end-to-end;
4. monitor ongoing performance with simulated and real user techniques; and
5. plan for contingencies.

Cross-Functional Readiness Team
Companies that take website preparation seriously for any seasonal or high-traffic event think about scalability and performance across the entire business, including development, web operations, IT systems, marketing, sales, etc. While web operations takes primary responsibility for website readiness, regular meetings with a core group of stakeholders is critical to ensure getting the input needed. Doing so voices not just technical issues but broader issues such as the overall customer experience or supply chain readiness.

Production Load Testing
Everybody tests their website, right? This may be true, but the real question is whether those tests truly validate that a website will perform well under peak traffic. The only way to know this is to simulate the expected number of visitors and their journeys through the site with real internet traffic in production. Production environments are larger scale and depend on different external systems than a staging or test environment. Testing services that use transactions generated from the cloud can replicate the conditions that actual shoppers will experience in production. This type of load testing models customer behavior and the ways in which users continually arrive on a site during peak events, no matter if on a laptop, smartphone or tablet.

End-to-End Transaction Performance Analysis
Thorough web load testing will result in errors and bottlenecks — maybe even a full-scale crash — and that's a good thing! The objective is to identify issues with garbage collection, caching, database connectivity and much more. This step also allows for collecting a large amount of data. If tested correctly, this provides enormous insight into network, infrastructure and application performance.

Ongoing Simulated and Real User Monitoring
Anticipate change going into a website peak period, and keep testing and monitoring for its impact on performance. Maintain a consistent baseline of clean-room measurements against which to benchmark performance. These measurements provide the guidance to identify issues. Also, augment this monitoring with performance measurements collected from actual user visits. In this respect you have both simulated and real-user monitoring data to provide benchmarks of optimum performance.

Contingency Planning
Despite the best testing, no system is perfect. Problems happen, sometimes out of the control of a site owner. Make sure you've designed your site so that it can gracefully handle system failures. Even if one of your vendors or external systems goes down, you need to be able to function, even if impaired, so consumers stay on your site and continue to place orders. If you need to then make the site unavailable overnight, for example, it can be painful but necessary to fix what can't be fixed while live.

Prioritize readiness. Test early, test often. Anticipate challenges. It's the only way to prepare for a major online event. Check out the infographic below to learn more.

Aaron Rudger is senior marketing manager for web performance at Keynote, a provider of mobile and website testing and monitoring. Aaron can be reached at aaron.rudger@keynote.com.