The document outlines five key considerations for preparing an ecommerce site for the holiday shopping season, emphasizing the importance of reviewing past performance, monitoring site speed, running load tests, securing the site, and optimizing for mobile. It highlights lessons learned from past site issues and the growing significance of mobile traffic in ecommerce. The document concludes by suggesting the use of a content delivery network (CDN) to improve site performance during high traffic periods.

1. 5 Considerations for Preparing Your
Ecommerce Site for the Holiday
Shopping Season

2. Is your site absolutely ready to accommodate high volume traffic surges
while maintaining speed and ensuring site availability?
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3. This 5 item checklist will help prepare your site for the
holiday shopping season
1. Review Past Web Performance Levels
2. Monitor Site Response Times and Speed
3. Run Load Tests
4. Secure your Site
5. Mobile Optimization

4. Review past web
performance
levels.
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5. Ask yourself the following questions:
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• Has your site
experienced spikes and
prevailed?
• Has your site crashed
before?
Note: Take a deep look into what impacts your ecommerce site experience
and what could be causing lags and delayed transactions.

6. In the past we’ve learned…
A sales-tax calculator on Bestbuy.com caused
a one hour delay for Reward Zone loyalty-club
members, who were given early access to ‘Black
Friday’ specials.
At the time, Best Buy had 40 million people in its
Reward Zone Loyalty program.
- Source: BizJournals
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7. In the past we’ve learned…
In 2011, Target experienced site crashes in the
weeks leading up to the holiday season when an
influx of shoppers went online to scoop up a new line
of high-end clothing and home accessories.
- Source: ComputerWorld
It crashed again six weeks
later!

8. Monitor site
response times
and speed.
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9. Ask yourself the following questions:
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• How fast does your site respond
and load?
• Does it lag significantly when
accessed from different
geographical regions?
• If you sell internationally, how fast
does it load in Europe? China?
Russia?

10. HP desktop performance reportedly took a
hit during Cyber Monday last year –
increasing load time by 30%
The problems on the site occurred during
“Search” and with the “Add to Cart”
functions; two critical points to transactional
success.
- Source: Data Center Knowledge

11. • Test your website’s speed and see how quickly it
responds in a given location, both nearby and far away
from your servers.
• Keep an eye on site response times all the way up to,
and through, your holiday promotions.
• Don’t be afraid to initiate several test transactions to
get an idea on what
adjustments may need to be made to
improve load time and responsiveness.

12. Run load tests.
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13. What is a load test?
• A load test examines the basic metrics about your
site (you could try this one by Media4X, but there
are several good ones out there).
• Load tests provide data on the total number of
page elements, size of files required to download
the page, a rundown of site images, status of HTML
and CSS code, and more.

14. Secure your
Site.
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15. Case in point…
A Target data breach put the information of an
estimated 70 million shoppers as risk
last year, pushing the company to cut its
fourth-quarter earnings forecast and as they
expected sales to decline by 2.5
percent.
- Source: Washington Post

16. Optimize for
mobile.
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17. Need to know…
Mobile sites that offer a friendly user
experience will likely reap monetary benefits
as ecommerce sales rose 20 percent on
Thanksgiving 2013 compared with 2012, with
traffic from mobile devices accounted for 43
percent of all online traffic.
- Source: Yahoo Finance

18. What Now?
With all this information at your disposal, you
have the power to optimize your site’s
performance for the heavy traffic to
come…And of course, you could always
employ a content delivery network (CDN) to
help your content flow steadily to and from
your end-users.

19. Get Started…
• Head over to CDNetworks.com
• Our mission is to transform the Internet into a
secure, reliable, scalable and high performing
Application Delivery Network. CDNetworks’ unique
position as the only multinational CDN with
expertise and infrastructure in China, Russia and
other emerging markets, enables us to be trusted
partners in local markets, while serving as foremost
experts on extending into global markets.