Salesforce Commerce Cloud data predictions reveal that 2019 will see at least 13% year-on-year revenue growth and total sales of USD 136 billion between November 1 and December 31 in the US alone. A lot of this is going to happen during the infamous Black Friday – Cyber Monday long weekend, also known as the Cyber Five. It is, after all, no longer a one-day event but a multi-day sales extravaganza in which consumer sales participation is high (up to 70% of consumers plan to get involved in the fun, according to McKinsey research) and growing globally.
The situation is do-or-die for a lot of retailers, and in 2019, due to how late in the month Thanksgiving falls, there will be one fewer week for retailers to reap the potential of the shopping season.
Remaining competitive requires a host of different things - from ensuring real-time product and availability/inventory information, to a wide and attractive selection of merchandise, from a responsive, available site across devices to on-site personalization and relevance. These factors will all contribute to a consumer’s perception of your brand and their willingness to spend their hard-earned income with you. Most companies doing business online know that a lot can go wrong – and a whole host of things must go right – to make a successful shopping season both for consumers and for themselves.
There are several things that can trip you up, from coding errors to problems with third-party extensions and plugins (these can also significantly slow down your site performance if they aren’t completely crashing your site), to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks to network downtime.
But what we’re going to talk about right now is how your good news – the abundant traffic to your website – can turn bad – think insurmountable traffic jam if you don’t prepare. Still, there is some good news on that front, too: you can prepare for this. The traffic is great: on one hand, many people coming to your site to shop at once is fabulous news for the bottom line. You want these sales! But you won’t come close to having them if, on the other hand, your servers are not set up to handle the rush, protecting your backend. Yes, the traffic overload can and will crash your entire site at the worst possible time.
Performance is the single most important thing your website must deliver during the all-important Cyber Five period. This is true all the time, really – why limit it to one five-day period a year? But in a revenue-driven, intensive period like the end-of-year holidays, you cannot afford to leave web performance to chance.
And what do we mean by web performance? Mostly we mean speed and availability of content (no downtime). But this also encompasses (by no means an exhaustive list):
What can you do to prepare? Turn to Varnish.
While it is clear that there is a lot to think about to optimize and deliver content to meet the demands of the Cyber Five window, it should be clear how serious web performance is all year round. Adopting Varnish to help you anticipate and be ready for these considerations will not only give you a leg up when your site is under maximum pressure – it will continue to be a feature-rich gift that keeps giving throughout the year.