When it comes to operating an ecommerce shop, a spike in customer traffic is a double-edged sword. It means you have a deluge of visitors and that can lead to sales, but only if a number of services and plugins with the correct optimizations and settings are in place supporting your WordPress website and WooCommerce plugin.
Overlooking even one detail can result in slow load times or your website crashing, resulting in a cascade of consequences including lost sales, customers migrating to competitors, lower search engine rankings, increased operating costs, and higher security risks.
Preparation is key. This article provides a checklist to prepare your WooCommerce site to support and facilitate peak sales for your business.
Having some idea of when a traffic spike may occur can be helpful in your overall preparation. Certain traffic drivers such as marketing campaigns and seasonal sales events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday are preplanned. Knowing about these events ahead of time allows you to gather a baseline understanding of what a traffic spike can look like, which is helpful in understanding where your weak points may be.
WooCommerce sites can also experience unexpected traffic spikes. For example, an influencer may take a liking to your product and post about it, leading to a sudden surge in visitors to your website.
Preparation for traffic spikes has to start with the foundation, your website hosting package. Are your traffic management needs being met by your package? Shared hosting plans, where you share server space with other businesses, are good for some situations where traffic is steady, but they provide limited resources for responding to more dynamic traffic. Another option is a dedicated server plan, which provides more consistent performance, greater control, and enhanced security but at a higher cost.
An even better option for businesses experiencing traffic spikes is a cloud hosting plan, which provides dynamic scalability, more flexibility and stronger cost-effectiveness. Cloud plans often provide access to load balancers, which allow your business to distribute traffic across multiple servers for better overall performance. They also position your website to take advantage of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), a group of geographically distributed servers that speed up the delivery of web content by bringing it closer to where the website visitor is, reducing server load times.
Once your business is aligned on the right hosting plan, the next step is to optimize the website itself. Enabling several caching strategies will help with managing traffic spikes.
Browser caching: This strategy takes cached versions of the website pages your visitors have browsed and stores them in local memory for quicker loads when pages are revisited.
Object caching: This strategy is set up on the server side, allowing you to store the results of database queries in memory for quicker access. This technique reduces the need to repeatedly execute the same queries and improves the website’s performance.
Be sure to support your caching strategies with the right plugin. Some standout options are WP Rocket, WP Fastest Cache, WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, and Cache Enabler.
Image optimization is another technique for improving your website’s page load times. Using a plugin like Smush, EWWW Image Optimizer, or Short Pixel to compress and resize the images on your website without impacting their quality will shorten the load time of your pages. Enabling lazy loading, where images only render when a user scrolls over them, is another technique for optimizing the page load speed.
Your database is the heart of your WooCommerce website, but it can also get cluttered over time, slowing down performance. Regular database cleanup, using a plugin like WP-Optimize, will optimize data retrieval and the overall performance of your website.
The last bit of website optimization is managing all the plugins. On a regular basis, review and deactivate unnecessary plugins while ensuring that all active plugins are well-coded and up-to-date.
In addition to the backend of your website, your website can be optimized on the frontend as well. While you want to offer an engaging appearance and functionality to your customers, too much of a good thing can lead to a slow user experience. Optimizing with lightweight themes like Astra, Zakra, and Hello Elementor will support quicker load times.
Another technique to consider is minifying CSS and JavaScript by removing unnecessary characters in files, which reduces their size and speeds up their load times. Keep in mind that visitors will be using a variety of devices and browsers to access your website, including smartphones. Responsive design on your website will optimize resource delivery and reduce unnecessary code to deliver a stronger and faster experience for your mobile visitors.
When both the backend and the frontend of your WooCommerce website have been optimized and dialed in, the next step is stress testing. This can be done with load testing tools like Load Impact (now K6) and JMeter, both of which provide heavy traffic simulations and report on how your website performs including bottlenecks and other weaknesses. Plugins can also be run through a performance check tool like P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler).
Also consider setting up real-time monitoring tools for tracking website performance metrics including server load and response time (Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix), and error rates (Logtivity). Alert systems should also be activated with the monitor tools to send out alerts if critical server functions approach their limits.
Even with all your preparation, things can still go awry on the big sale day. Have some backup strategies in place for managing peak traffic to avoid website crashes. Implementing a queue system, where during peak traffic periods visitors are driven to a first-in first-out virtual waiting room and given a countdown clock of their waiting time to access the website.
Businesses should also consider limiting inventory and Flash Sales to help control the volume of simultaneous transactions on the website. A final helpful strategy for managing peak traffic is to implement temporary site adjustments during peak visit times, such as disabling non-essential features, to help avoid slowing the user experience.
Clear communication is a key element of maintaining good customer relationships. This holds true for visitors’ expectations of your WooCommerce website. Get ahead of potential problems by informing customers about possible delays or website limitations during peak periods. Also be prepared to boost your customer support during peak periods so you can inform and answer questions from customers relating to any delays or limitations happening during peak periods.
High traffic on your website is to be celebrated. But to make the most of it you need to take care of all the preparations ahead of time, including:
Making these investments in time, effort, and budget ahead of peak traffic events will deliver improved sales and more satisfied customers.
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