Preparing for christmas website traffic

Preparing for another frantic holiday season: how to cope with christmas website traffic

What we learnt from black friday and cyber monday and how to control hefty web traffic surges as we head for the busiest shopping season of the year

On the first day of Christmas, my truelove sent to me: site crashes, lockouts, too much traffic to cope with, a terrible customer experience, and a massive loss of revenue…

Black Friday looks as though it was as popular as ever in 2023, despite the problems retailers—online and off—have faced over holiday season over a very tricky few years.



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Are you ready for the surges in your system?

If you’re an online retailer, are you ready for massive online retail traffic from social media, organic traffic, or search engine optimisation? Can your system safely manage the vastly increased numbers of holiday visitors we’re expecting to see as we hit December and for the rest of the month? Or are you crossing your fingers your existing purchase systems won’t be stretched to breaking point during world holiday shopping season?

The solution to your e commerce demand problem

When it comes to increased web traffic from holiday visitors and bandwidth issues, several practices can help ease the pressure of more internet traffic and provide your users with a better experience as they purchase, keeping customers happy and informed and keeping hold of the sales you depend on.

You could upgrade your website in late november or early december to manage bigger numbers, adding more christmas holiday traffic capacity when you need it—but do you know how much you’re likely to need and what that costs?

Alternatively, you could take advantage of content distribution networks or compression filters. They could help, or you could add a simple, single line of JavaScript to organise all of your overflow christmas traffic into a neat and orderly queue.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Well, the good news is, it is.

Managing your excess traffic into customised, comforting queues

Queue-Fair offers retailers an off-site virtual waiting room — a neat and ordered queuing system that’s fair, fast, and great for business. When your website isn’t under pressure, you won’t even know it’s there. When it is, it’ll save your site from unwanted crashes, failed search traffic, slow-downs, lock-ups, and lost sales.

Here’s how it works:

Traffic flows into your website. If everything is okay, life carries on as usual. However, if you’re close to your traffic limit, new users will be filtered away from your website into a first-come, first-served queue until it’s their turn to return to your website and complete their purchase.

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What’s better, those customers are continually informed of every detail and data they need—from their position in the queue to the time until they'll flow back into the site. What’s better still, with so many customisation options, you can use that time to upsell or introduce your queue to associated items and more must-have special offers on your sites.

Before you know it, they’re back on your site with a full basket, and everyone’s managed to stay calm, collected, and comforted.

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What about the Christmas Change Freeze?

For those who don’t know what that is, it’s the period of highly-anticipated heavy traffic where engineers and managers are reluctant to update or alter their websites in case teething problems and testing causes a drop in traffic or unseen issues from unexpected bugs and setbacks.

With that in mind, most updates typically scheduled for cyber monday sales or December are held back until January, when there’s a lot less to lose with far lower traffic and sales stakes on the table - though christmas day itself remains a low traffic day.

Queue-Fair has the CCF worriers covered

Queue-Fair doesn’t add any complicated and troublesome updates to your website—all it takes is a single line of JavaScript, easy to add to any wordpress site or other web platform in seconds.

For those who want more control, it offers server side integration, but to get you through the frantic, festive period, all it takes is a simple, single line of code and your chrismas traffic business problems are solved, keeping you ahead of the market competition while you can focus on relaxing through the holiday.

For online retailers who want to create an effective and structured solution to that extra, expected traffic, Queue-Fair delivers the peace of mind you need for all the holiday seasons to come, as well as the peace and goodwill of the holiday period.

This article first published at Smart Retail Tech.


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