Prepare Your eCommerce Site For Peak Season

The peak season for eCommerce is almost upon us. Are your site's technology ecosystem and team prepared to take full advantage of this critical sales period? 

At Echidna, we know technology alone is never the whole solution to running a successful eCommerce business, but it is the engine you’ve built your business on. Like any engine, rushed design and improper maintenance often lead to poor performance. The tips below provide your team guidance to make sure that your eCommerce engine is running smoothly into peak season and beyond. 

Review Site Security 

Hacked sites and stolen credit card data will wreak havoc on company growth. Check to ensure security patches have been applied properly and examine vulnerabilities common to your specific eCommerce technology platform in order to detect viruses and malware before they become problematic. To ensure a safe and secure environment is in place you will also want to analyze payment configurations, user accounts, admin panel, and the database.

Optimize Site Performance

Speed is more important than ever to conversion rates and search engine rankings. In order to optimize site performance, start with an audit of your front end. This audit should include a report of the server response time of each page, cookie usage, DOM element size, 404 pages, and HTTP requests. From there you can take the data and use it to improve site design, optimize scripts, optimize image size, reduce HTTP requests, and more. 

Load and Stress Testing

Before peak season, consider the amount of traffic your site anticipates. You can look to months and years past to calculate an approximate value. With this information, perform traffic and performance testing in your Staging and Production environments for your front and backend processes based on the estimated traffic amount. This testing will often expose deficiencies and also allow you to determine areas that might require additional capacity.

Overall Site Health Check

Taking the entire database, theme, extensions, and file systems into account is a great preventative measure to catch anything troubling before it makes an impact on your business. Make sure to review your robots.txt and .htacess file for indexing or 301 redirect issues that are hindering site health. Taking preventative measures to review your site's health before peak season will help you from encountering issues in the future. 

Complete Code Audit

A comprehensive analysis of both front-end and back-end code will help improve overall site performance and overall customer experience, identifying bottlenecks related to code. With this type of audit a list of recommendations for site improvements and optimizations, guidance on following platform-specific best practices, and actionable insights on further managed services support will be manifested.

Take advantage of Echidna’s eCommerce Technology Assessment

Our goal is to help you build the foundation needed for high-performance experiences at peak business while keeping your technology maintenance and operations costs low.  Innovation thrives on efficiency.

Echidna’s senior developers have been trained and certified in numerous eCommerce platforms including Adobe Commerce Cloud, Kibo Commerce, VTEX, Spryker, and Oracle Commerce Cloud. Our comprehensive eCommerce technology assessment provides you with actionable items and tasks which we can help you apply or you can take back to your in-house or existing agency to fix issues before they become problematic during peak season.

Learn how we can help you prepare your eCommerce site for peak season.

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