With Black Friday and Cyber Monday just weeks away, Catchpoint has identified the top five technical items most likely to cause web or mobile shopping sites to perform poorly.
When an online retail site is unavailable on a big shopping day, it is essentially the same as shutting the doors of a physical store
Every Black Friday-Cyber Monday weekend in the last decade has seen at least one major online retailer with web or mobile site outages or slowdowns. Memories of last year’s Black Friday problems, and Amazon’s Prime Day missteps this summer, should remind retailers that no company, big or small, is immune to interruptions or slowdowns in its sites’ digital experience.
Online retailers can learn from the mistakes of the past to optimally prepare and best position themselves for a smooth kick-off to the holidays.
The following elements are the most likely to cause slow load times or outages in the upcoming season:
1. Third Parties
These are site elements hosted by outside companies and beyond the direct control of the main site. One sluggish third-party component can slow down an entire web page. Example: in 2016 a high-end home goods retailer experienced very slow page load times intermittently on Black Friday due to problems with a third-party photo display service.
2. Regional View
If an online retailer monitors page load times only using national averages, it could be missing local or statewide performance problems. Example: in 2016 a major retailer experienced problems on its desktop site due to an ad tech provider, ultimately leading to ongoing site blackouts in Phoenix, starting early in the long holiday weekend.
3. Critical APIs
APIs are fundamental components of e-commerce sites, often supporting customer-facing, revenue-generating applications. Like third party services, popular APIs can come under major strain during peak traffic periods. If an API supporting payment options on a site breaks, an abandoned shopping cart will be the likely result.
4. Page Weight
One of the easiest ways to ensure faster load times is to make certain a site’s page weight (amount of data loaded into a shopper’s browser) isn’t too large. This is a technique large and small retailers often employ during peak traffic days, usually by eliminating excess images or graphics.
5. Server Scalability
The Amazon Prime Day outage was reported to be the simple result of overloaded servers. Load testing internal servers is one of the most straightforward, simple things one can do, as well as having additional servers on standby.
When an online retail site is unavailable on a big shopping day, it is essentially the same as shutting the doors of a physical store. And when your page load time slows, that’s the same as forcing a customer to stand in a long checkout line.
It’s important to remember that comprehensive monitoring from the end-user perspective is the definitive way to gain visibility into all the performance-impacting elements in the delivery chain, including those beyond one’s own firewall.
The Latest
Broad proliferation of cloud infrastructure combined with continued support for remote workers is driving increased complexity and visibility challenges for network operations teams, according to new research conducted by Dimensional Research and sponsored by Broadcom ...
New research from ServiceNow and ThoughtLab reveals that less than 30% of banks feel their transformation efforts are meeting evolving customer digital needs. Additionally, 52% say they must revamp their strategy to counter competition from outside the sector. Adapting to these challenges isn't just about staying competitive — it's about staying in business ...
Leaders in the financial services sector are bullish on AI, with 95% of business and IT decision makers saying that AI is a top C-Suite priority, and 96% of respondents believing it provides their business a competitive advantage, according to Riverbed's Global AI and Digital Experience Survey ...
SLOs have long been a staple for DevOps teams to monitor the health of their applications and infrastructure ... Now, as digital trends have shifted, more and more teams are looking to adapt this model for the mobile environment. This, however, is not without its challenges ...
Modernizing IT infrastructure has become essential for organizations striving to remain competitive. This modernization extends beyond merely upgrading hardware or software; it involves strategically leveraging new technologies like AI and cloud computing to enhance operational efficiency, increase data accessibility, and improve the end-user experience ...
AI sure grew fast in popularity, but are AI apps any good? ... If companies are going to keep integrating AI applications into their tech stack at the rate they are, then they need to be aware of AI's limitations. More importantly, they need to evolve their testing regiment ...
If you were lucky, you found out about the massive CrowdStrike/Microsoft outage last July by reading about it over coffee. Those less fortunate were awoken hours earlier by frantic calls from work ... Whether you were directly affected or not, there's an important lesson: all organizations should be conducting in-depth reviews of testing and change management ...
In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 11, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) ...
On average, only 48% of digital initiatives enterprise-wide meet or exceed their business outcome targets according to Gartner's annual global survey of CIOs and technology executives ...
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping industries around the world. From optimizing business processes to unlocking new levels of innovation, AI is a critical driver of success for modern enterprises. As a result, business leaders — from DevOps engineers to CTOs — are under pressure to incorporate AI into their workflows to stay competitive. But the question isn't whether AI should be adopted — it's how ...
