Is Your Magento Store Ready for Peak Sales Season

Is your Magento store ready to handle peak loads this holiday season? Are you sure it won’t crumble during the busiest shopping days of the year?

If you’re under the impression that your Magento store is already capable of handling high loads, let me tell you that there may be instances of slow performances or server going down. Actually what happens is, people during holiday season spend umpteen numbers of hours online while looking at deals, making researches and of course, shopping. But because of enormous traffic, the website slows down and takes longer in loading pages.

You really can’t afford to crash or slow down especially at that time of the year when you expect highest sales. It’s important to prepare well in advance for this special season and optimize your store to handle heavier traffic and transaction volumes.

There is no denying that Magento has an excellent in-built caching and is capable of handling huge volumes of traffic but still it’s ideal to maximize your store’s holiday readiness to smoothly deal with the busiest shopping time of the year.

Ways to Make Your Magento Store Ready for Peak Sales Season

Predictive Load Testing

You might have certain expectations about potential customers this holiday season. So, why not conduct a predictive load testing of your system for peak scenarios? Test its capability to deal with various situations including browsing, buying and transactions. If you do not have expertise in-house, you can avail professional help. A lot of companies providing Magento store development services can also help you load test your system and optimize it accordingly.

Magento Application Caching Features

As mentioned earlier, the platform boasts of its strong in-built caching mechanism allowing users to cache configurations, blocks, layouts, collections data, translations, pages and web service configurations. Improve the health of your Magento store by enabling these caches via the Magento Admin panel.

Get Rid of Out-of-Date Info

The thumb of rule is to have less data including products, promotions and informatory content on the website to enhance the speed of response times. By this, I don’t mean to say that you should go for thinning your product line but this includes cleaning up of outdated information, products and promotional offers from the website. You can also consider removing all inactive CMS pages during the holiday season to ensure that they don’t unnecessarily eat up your space and speed.

Offload Old Data

Whatever old data is stored in your system, better offload it before the holiday season begins. Make ample room for new things, new details, new orders and new transactions by offloading the existing or last season’s data and storing it somewhere else. Let these two not coincide with each other.

Clean up Extra Rules for Promotions

More the rules and terms and conditions for promotions, more time browsers will take to go through them and more are the calculations that your system has to perform. Keep things simple and minimize the rules to ensure faster response time.

Put Out of Action Any Extra Functionality

Have a Backup Plan

Do not ever underestimate the importance of a backup plan or technical support team. Your system might crumble because of extremely heavy traffic. Just be prepared to deal with the worst scenario and think of a backup strategy to ensure that you’re back in business/online within just a few minutes. You can’t afford to remain offline for long during the peak sales season.

Avail Professional Assistance

If you don’t have a Magento team in-house, you can seek professional assistance to keep your store in good health and maximize its performance during holiday season. You can also hire an offsite team of Magento developers to assist you in optimizing your e-store. 

There are numerous web development companies offering such services. However, the best idea is to outsource the job to a company that has its development center in developing countries like India. This way, you not only get expert assistance without recruiting in-house but also save a lot of money.

You can also combine the benefits of local communication and assistance and cost-efficient offshore development by sourcing a company having headquarters in the United States and development center in countries like India. They can also help you in creating a team of expert Magento store builders offshore that will work exclusively on your project.