Tips to Prepare Your Web Site for the Holiday Rush

With a competitor’s shop only a click away, and your reputation and profits at stake, it’s imperative you give Web users the best experience possible every time they visit your site.

Here are a few ways you can prepare your Web site for the heavy volume of holiday traffic expected this season.

* Load test. For any e-tailer anticipating a dramatic spike in traffic — whether for Cyber Monday, the result of special promotions, or for some other special sale or event — it’s essential to know how many users your site can accommodate. Load testing lets you simulate Web traffic, providing insight into how your site responds and behaves under different user loads. By performing a load test prior to the holiday shopping season, you can determine the breaking point of your site, and make adjustments if you expect traffic to exceed that limit. Load testing is crucial to avoiding site outages due to unexpected scalability issues that could result in thousands, even millions, of dollars in lost revenue.