How to Prepare Your Magento eCommerce Store for the Holiday Season

Is your Magento eCommerce store ready to handle peak loads this holiday season? Are you positive it won’t crumble during the busiest online shopping days of the year? Always be aware of possible instances of slow performances or server going down. We will discus how to prepare your Magento eCommerce store for the holiday season to ensure it will handle high loads quickly and efficiently.

How to Prepare Your Magento eCommerce Store for the Holiday Season

While there is no denying that Magento has excellent built-in caching and is capable of handling huge volumes of traffic, it is still ideal to maximize your store’s holiday readiness to smoothly deal with the busiest online shopping time of the year. In addition, you should also ensure your eCommerce website is responsive and works well in mobile and ipad devices.

Predictive Load Testing

You probably have certain expectations about potential customers this holiday season. So, why not conduct a predictive load testing of your system for peak scenarios? Test your eCommerce’s capability to deal with a variety of situations including browsing, buying and transactions. If you do not have expertise in-house, you can seek professional help. Centennial Arts provides Magento eCommerce application support services to help you load test your system and optimize it accordingly.

Magento Application Caching Features

As mentioned previously, Magento boasts of its strong in-built caching mechanism which allows users to cache configurations, blocks, layouts, collections data, translations, pages and web service configuration.

You can improve the health of your Magento eCommerce store by enabling these caches via the Magento Admin panel.

Get Rid of Out-of-Date Information

The rule of thumb is to have less data including products, promotions and informatory content on the website. This will help to enhance the speed of response times.

However, this doesn’t mean that you should go for thinning your product line. This means cleaning up outdated information, products and promotional offers from your website. Also, remove all inactive CMS pages during the holiday season. This will ensure that they don’t unnecessarily eat up your space and speed as well.

Offload Old Data

It is ideal to offload any old data you’re currently storing in the system before the holiday season begins.

Make plenty of room for new things, new details, new orders and new transactions. You can do this 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

The more rules and terms and conditions for promotions, the more time browsers will take to go through them and the more are the calculations that your system has to perform.

Keep things simple and minimize the rules to make sure your eCommerce has faster response time.

Have a Backup Plan

Never underestimate the importance of a backup plan or a technical support team. Extreme heavy traffic can cause your system to crumble.

Just make sure to prepare for the worst case scenario. Think of a backup strategy to ensure that you are back in business/online within just a few minutes. You can’t afford to remain offline for long during the peak sales season.

 

These are just the basics of how to prepare your Magento eCommerce store for the holiday season. If you don’t have an in-house Magento team, you can always seek professional assistance to keep your eCommerce store running efficient and maximize its performance during the busy holiday season. Centennial Arts can handle all your eCommerce hosting and support needs. Contact us with the link below for more information!