Bulletproof Your Adobe Commerce Store: Technical Essentials for Black Friday Success
Black Friday is around the corner, and if your Adobe Commerce store isn’t ready for the surge in traffic and equipped with the essentials for Black Friday success, you’re leaving money on the table. Don’t worry, though; we’ve got you covered. Here are seven tips to make sure your store doesn’t just survive the Black Friday frenzy but thrives through it.
1. Synchronise Marketing and IT for Traffic Predictions
Before you even think about the technicalities, align your marketing and IT teams as part of your Black Friday success strategy. Both need to have a clear understanding of the projected traffic. Use historical data and current marketing reach to make an educated estimate. Once you have this number, you can make more informed decisions on resource allocation.
2. Stress-Testing: The Heavy Lifting Before the Main Event
Your website needs to be as prepared for Black Friday as a marathon runner on race day. Performing tests using Apache JMeter or similar tools will give you the specifics – what breaks, at what traffic volume, and how.
Don’t just aim to meet your traffic forecast; prepare for even higher numbers. After all, breaking a sales record often means breaking traffic records too.
3. Select a Robust Hosting Provider
Your hosting provider is essentially your website’s backbone, and they need to be your partner in this Black Friday journey. When looking for a provider, do all the background checks you can. Scrutinise their customer service ratings and response times.
Can they provide support when your team is running on caffeine and nerves 10 minutes before launch? Also, you’ll need to explore scalability options beforehand so you can do so seamlessly, without manual intervention, when your site experiences peak traffic.
4. Horizontal vs Vertical Scaling
Understand your scaling options well ahead of time. Vertical scaling means you’re upgrading your server’s existing power – think of it as turbocharging a car. It’s a quick way to boost performance but has its limitations, dictated by the server’s maximum capabilities.
Horizontal scaling is a bit different. Imagine your website is a busy highway; adding more lanes helps accommodate more cars. In tech terms, this means you’re adding new servers or instances to distribute traffic. While it might take a bit more time to set up, it’s a more flexible approach, especially useful when you’re expecting an increase in traffic, like on Black Friday.
5. Detect Your Weak Points with Application Performance Management Tools
Application Performance Management (APM) tools like New Relic or Blackfire.io are your magnifying glass for locating bottlenecks – narrow points in your system where data slows down, causing delays and affecting your website’s performance.
But knowing the bottleneck exists isn’t enough. These tools also provide actionable data to solve the issue at its core – whether it’s optimising a database query or offloading a CPU-intensive task to another server. Implement the fixes and then run follow-up tests to make sure the issue has been genuinely resolved.
6. Implement a Code Freeze
Code freezes are like the quiet before the storm, a time when your developers can focus on polishing and optimising what’s already there. Adding new features can introduce new bugs, and a bug detected late in the day can lead to hasty, ill-advised fixes.
Therefore, commit to a code freeze well ahead of Black Friday, allowing your team to direct its energy towards refining the existing setup for peak performance.
7. Proactive Monitoring Is Your Safety Net
Real-time monitoring tools like Grafana or New Relic aren’t just about sounding the alarm when things go wrong. They give you a live dashboard to track various performance metrics. If a particular server starts to overheat or a database query slows down, you can catch it before it impacts the customer experience. Being proactive here can make the difference between a small hiccup and a full-fledged outage.
Your Adobe Commerce store is primed for Black Friday success, you’re Welcome!
These seven tips will be your technical game plan to elevate your Adobe Commerce store for Black Friday Traffic.
If your current eCommerce agency hasn’t briefed you on these vital tips, perhaps it’s time for an upgrade. Contact us at thrive@wearejh.com