It’s Black Friday again and between exceptional discounts and limited-time promotions, users are preparing for the Christmas season by shopping on the main eshops. According to a recent survey conducted by Wells Fargo, this year 70% of people will not go to physical stores, but will prefer online purchases. And it is precisely for this reason that, to help ecommerce to take advantage of this trend, SiteGround has listed a number of recommendations for us improve your website in view of Black Friday 2022.
One of the critical issues in these periods is certainly the excessive traffic that risks throwing less structured sites into crisis. According to SiteGround, during the Black Friday period, a website can reach traffic up to ten times higher than the average, so the advice is to arrive prepared for this eventuality. The two signals that should act as alarm bells are:
- Slow loading speed. Users don’t like to wait: a one second delay in loading time equates to a 7% loss in conversions and an 11% decrease in page views (according to Aberdeen Group). This situation is further exacerbated during Black Friday, when online shoppers don’t want to miss out and are more impatient than ever.
- Site errors and unresponsive pages. The scarcer the portal resources are, the more likely errors are to occur, with potentially huge negative impact, including loss of revenue, damage to reputation, reduction of customer base and much more.
Tips for your site ahead of Black Friday
SiteGround reports that there are essentially three precautions to be taken in these circumstances:
To maximize sales SiteGround recommends choose the right type of hosting according to your needs. It is advisable to choose Cloud Hosting services if you have an eCommerce and it is essential that it includes the scalability function. This allows you to add resources to the cloud, when needed, without risking any downtime. A perfect solution for managing important traffic peaks.
Caching is also essential on a website and helps speed up page opening for site visitors. For an eCommerce object cache is a great way to save resources as online stores use a site’s database even more often than regular sites. By caching content like product pages, visitors can browse items more quickly.
Images and DNS
Don’t underestimate the images. These can make the site more attractive, but risk slowing it down significantly. If your site is built with WordPress, the easiest place to start is to use a plugin to optimize images featured on your site. A plugin can reduce the size of images without harming their quality, remove all unnecessary data, and increase the overall performance of your site. Make sure you upload images no larger than necessary. If you want to display a 300×300 pixel image, do not upload a 1024×1024 image and then set it to display smaller. Resize it before uploading it to the site.
Finally, the last tip to improve your site on the occasion of Black Friday, is to enable a CDN. This is able to ensure your site an optimization of the management of international traffic and at the same time of the local one. SiteGround has created a dedicated CDN article to explain not only the service differences and when to use it, but has also developed its own proprietary CDN to further improve website performance.