While every eCommerce business would love to have a high volume of traffic, some of them are not being naively optimistic when they prepare for such a significant amount of visitors. Some of them, in fact, are merely being realistic, particularly if they’re well aware of the fact that, upon opening their new site, they’re going to get a flood of traffic.
Here are some of the things that you will need to consider if you are building a site and you are reasonably certain it’s going to be high traffic. There will be concerns with both hardware and software that you will have to address.
Scalability
Web hosts have different ways of offering scalability in their products. From the hardware end, you might want to make certain that, as you build traffic, you can scale up your hosting plan so that your servers can handle visitors adequately. This means that the visitors should not experience any delays when they visit your site and that everything should serve quickly.
Cloud hosting is one of the more popular solutions to this need at present. This type of hosting allows you to expand the capabilities of your hosting as needed. This is something you may want to consider if you know you’re going to get a lot of traffic, but you’re not sure how much it’s going to grow and how quickly.
Premium cloud hosting providers like Rackspace Cloud which we are using for our clients servers offer load balancers to connect multiple servers into one web cluster. Load balancer handles the traffic and sends visitors to the least loaded web server. There is some special considerations required when setting up load balancing for e-commerce system to handle shopping cart sessions and software cache properly.
Site Designs and Customizations
High-traffic websites have to be very streamlined. With any visitors making demands on the server simultaneously, the opportunities for slowdowns are greatly increased and, because of that, the webpages themselves have to be designed around this.
Where webpage design is concerned, make certain that you hire a qualified developer to handle the job for you. They can make sure that everything is within the parameters required for a very busy site. In over 12 years managing e-commerce client we saw a lot of cheap designs and customizations done by third party developers which caused major issues with server overloading even with moderate traffic. Problem is that unskilled developer is concerned only with implementing functionality requested by store owner without consideration of optimizing the code. So poorly designed layouts and customizations run fine in test environment but fail as soon as traffic hits the store.
An example with numbers: client with apparel store moved X-cart based system to us at the end of last year and was running happily on 4GB server for $250 per month. They wanted some customization done to how product variants are shown in the store to make it easy for customers to select different sizes and colors – good idea. Quote we sent was $800 to be done by our developers because this a relatively complex customization. Client thought this was too expensive and got customization done by a team from “less expensive environment”. I believe they paid around $600 for it. 25% saved? Customization looked fine in development store but as soon as it was installed in production store we started getting outage alerts every time promotional mail blast went out from this store – server was getting overloaded by spike in traffic – server had to be restarted which kicked all browsing customers from the store for 5-10 minutes so they see an error. Not acceptable. Fast solution was to upgrade that client to a larger server, we moved this store to 8GB server which is $350 per month (extra $100 per month over previous setup) – it was handling the spikes but store would noticeably slow down when traffic hits. Client was running like this for three months until they decided to have us to fix the code. Fixing the code ended up costing over $500 and we had to rewrite more than half of the internal code of that customization. After this, store was fast again and we downgraded server back to 4GB – we did not have any overloads on this server for the last 6 months. That “cheap” customization ended up costing client $1400 ($600 customization + $100 x 3 months for larger server + $500 to fix) plus lost orders during server restarts and lost customers because of slow downs.
My point is – make sure your design and customizations are done right and optimized for speed so you do not have to pay every month for a much larger server because you saved $200 on development.
Content Delivery Networks
A content delivery network, CDN, can speed the loading of webpages by delivering static content from the server closest to the customer. This is something that you want to consider if you know your site is going to get a great deal of traffic. Many web hosts will help you get set up with a CDN, making it a fairly easy endeavor, and don’t require you to handle any of the technical heavy lifting.
Database Optimization
Make sure that your database is optimized and that, of course, all of the entries in it are correct and consistent. We ran nightly database checks and optimizations on all the servers we manage for clients which proved to be one of the best preventive actions to avoid downtimes and checkout errors due to database problems.
Testing
Make sure your site is tested before it is deployed. Testing is something with which you will want expert assistance and it includes debugging, which is something that programmers have to handle. There are services that can simulate high traffic hitting your store before you spend thousands on advertising just to find out your shopping cart hangs when too many customers are just about to pay you.
Provided you have a reliable and scalable hosting, solid eCommerce platform like Magento, properly optimized database and design, your store should be able to handle very high levels of traffic. Remember that scalability factor, as you do not want to end up with a hosting package that is inadequate just when your business is really starting to succeed.
To your success!
Anton Pachkine – General Manager of FinestShops (follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn or call 1-800-675-0162 ex 704
FinestShops offers premium WooCommerce, Magento and X-Cart managed hosting for companies without a large IT department and will manage your online store and servers like your own dedicated IT department so you and your staff can concentrate on growing your sales and serving your customers. Visit www.finestshops.com
